Thomas Paine, Ralph Nader, and Malcolm X
Today in the United States, it is politically correct to have high regard and even awe for famous Americans who have challenged and resisted illegitimate authority. However, many of these same anti-authoritarians were hated and shunned at their life’s end. The extraordinary lives of the following group of anti-authoritarians offer evidence that even the greatest of contributions do not inoculate anti-authoritarians from marginalization in U.S. society.
It may seem odd to see Thomas Paine, Ralph Nader, and Malcolm X in the same group, but they have commonalities. The boldness of actions by Paine, Nader, and Malcolm X separated themselves from their contemporaries, even from those with similar political views. All three, by virtue of their extraordinary talents and some luck, were remarkably successful in positively transforming the lives of millions of Americans. All three cared little about wealth or personally profiting from their contributions. All three were unintimidated by the violence of the illegitimate authorities whom they challenged and resisted. All three refused to tolerate hypocrisy in anyone, and for that, all three were punished severely. Paine was ostracized by a nation that he, in major ways, had helped to create. Nader was shunned by progressives after his unparalleled progressive accomplishments. And Malcolm X was assassinated by members of a religious organization despite his genius for making their institution a large and powerful one.
With respect to their legacies, there are also similarities. Thomas Paine and Malcolm X, hated at the time of their deaths, are now American icons with U.S. postage stamps honoring them both—but with the most radical aspects of their lives and politics largely ignored. And Ralph Nader too will likely share that fate.
Anti-authoritarians’ refusal to be intimidated by the political consequences of challenging authority can—at the right moment in time and with some luck—be successful. What can catch anti-authoritarians by surprise is that no matter how important their supporters have deemed their past contributions, if their other anti-authoritarian actions create problems for their supporters, admiration can quickly turn to abandonment and assault. What is especially sad is how previous extraordinary accomplishments in no way mitigates the ferocity of these assaults.
Thomas Paine
“He had faults, like other men; but it was for his virtues that he was hated and successfully calumniated.”
—Bertrand Russell, “The Fate of Thomas Paine,” 1934
“One by one most of his old friends and acquaintances had deserted him. Maligned on every side, execrated, shunned and abhorred—his virtues denounced as vices—his services forgotten—his character blackened, he preserved the poise and balance of his soul.”
—Robert Ingersoll, “Thomas Paine,” 1892
Thomas Paine (1737–1809) was one of the most influential anti-authoritarians in not only U.S. history but in world history. In Thomas Paine and the Promise of America, his biographer Harvey Kaye tells us, “He fought to liberate men and women from the authoritarianism of states, classes, and churches and to empower them to think for and govern themselves.” Yet despite Paine’s great talents, unparalleled accomplishments, famous friends, popularity, and admiration, he was, at the end of his life, hated and shunned by virtually an entire nation that he had a large part in creating.
Paine came to the American colonies just before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War in one of the more anti-authoritarian eras in American history, and he took advantage of these circumstances to become—for a time—widely admired. Like the other anti-authoritarians who I profile, Paine was compelled to challenge all illegitimate authorities regardless of political consequences. He would come to denounce and ridicule the most popular man and the most popular belief system in the United States. This resulted in Paine being ostracized and marginalized in U.S. society in the last years of his life—and long after his death. Paine’s legacy has had a historical comeback, and he is today honored for challenging and resisting British control over colonial America, and he is admired for his role in fomenting the American Revolution. But his historical comeback has been based on a convenient neglect of his most politically incorrect condemnations.
Born Thomas Pain, later changing the spelling to Paine, he was to become a major pain in the ass for authorities around the world. As a teenager, he apprenticed to his stay-maker (corsetmaker) father. As a young adult, Paine became an exciseman (a government official who inspects and rates articles liable to tax), but he was fired after two years for claiming to have been working while actually studying at home. He became a poorly paid schoolmaster until he was able to get reinstated as an exciseman. Paine and other excise officers asked Parliament for higher pay and better working conditions, and Paine published his first political work in 1772, The Case of the Officers of Excise; and in early 1774, he was fired again from the excise service. His other financial efforts failed, and to avoid debtors’ prison he sold his household possessions.
Paine’s first wife had died in 1760, a year after their wedding; and, by 1774, he was separated from his second wife, and his financial life was in shambles. Paine saw the British system—Parliament, the monarchy, and hereditary authority—as the reason for his failure. Paine’s personal pain compelled him to gain justice for himself and others similarly oppressed. He was committed to exposing the illegitimacy of the British system of rule, and there was no better place to do that than in colonial America where Paine would find a receptive audience.
At age 37, Paine was a “societal loser,” but he then got a huge break, meeting Benjamin Franklin in London. Franklin was impressed by Paine and provided him with a letter of recommendation (calling Paine an “ingenious, worthy young man”). Franklin’s name was gold in colonial America, especially in Franklin’s home town of Philadelphia, where Paine immigrated to in 1774, using Franklin’s recommendation to great advantage.
“Paine arrived in America,” notes biographer Eric Foner, “with a unique combination of resentments against the English system of government and opportunities for immediate self-advancement and self-expression.” In January 1775, Paine became editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine, and he proceeded to increase its circulation. In March 1775, Paine called for the abolition of slavery, pointing out the hypocrisy of white colonials complaining about British tyranny while being silent about their own slaveholding.
Paine was a working-class guy and thus quite different from most of the elitist “founding fathers.” As late as November 1775, Thomas Jefferson wrote that “there is not in the British Empire a man who more cordially loves union with Great Britain than I do,” and Kaye also reported that George Washington continued to toast King George III at dinners with his officers. In contrast, Paine viewed the entire British authority—not just Parliament—as illegitimate, and he would voice the then-taboo word independence.
Paine sensed that colonial America was craving a down-to-earth writer who could describe why Great Britain was an illegitimate authority. “Paine’s importance in history,” concluded Bertrand Russell (English philosopher, mathematician, historian, and social critic), “consists in the fact that he made the preaching of democracy democratic.” Paine was, Russell noted, “an innovator in the manner of his writing, which was simple, direct, unlearned, and such as every intelligent workingman could appreciate.”
In January 1776, Paine published Common Sense, at first anonymously, but soon after he became known as its author. In it, Paine made clear that it wasn’t just the current bad king or the current bad government leaders but the entire notion of monarchy, aristocracy, and the British system of rule that was illegitimate. Common Sense is what most U.S. students are taught about Paine, as it remains his most politically correct work.
In the three months following its publication, 150,000 copies of Common Sense were distributed; and including pirated editions, an estimated 500,000 copies were circulated throughout the colonies during the course of the American Revolution. At that time, there were approximately three million free colonial inhabitants, and so Common Sense was read by an astonishing percentage of colonial America. No other writer was so widely read, but Paine refused to financially profit by it.
Six months after the publication of Common Sense, in July 1776, the Continental Congress ratified the Declaration of Independence. The American Revolution was in full steam by late 1776 when Paine published a series of pamphlets, The American Crisis. This was a propaganda effort meant to inspire a dispirited colonial army and prevent George Washington’s troops from quitting on him, as well as to help Washington maintain his job as commanding officer. To inspire his soldiers, Washington had the first Crisis read aloud to his troops, which begins with these now famous words: “These are the times that try men’s souls.”
Following the success of the American Revolution, Paine returned to Europe to help incite revolution there. Paine’s Rights of Man (first part published in 1791) refuted the British conservative Edmund Burke’s criticism of the French Revolution, criticized the William Pitt–led government of Great Britain, and objected to hereditary rule. The second part of Rights of Man (1792) described social programs to reduce poverty of the commoners. Rights of Man became an international sensation and stimulated reform societies.
In England, Paine became the object of a smear campaign conducted by the enraged William Pitt. The British public was told that Paine had, historian Jill Lepore reports, “defrauded his creditors, caused his first wife’s death by beating her while she was pregnant, and abused his second wife almost as badly, except that she wasn’t really his wife, because he never consummated that marriage, preferring to have sex with cats.” Paine’s friend, poet William Blake, convinced him that if he remained in England he would be hanged, and so Paine bolted for France, narrowly missing arresting officers.
Paine had been enthusiastic about the French Revolution, and his Rights of Man made him a celebrity in France where he was granted honorary French citizenship. Despite his inability to speak French, Paine was elected to the French National Convention. However, Paine’s integrity again got him in trouble with authorities—this time with the authoritarian Robespierre and his fellow Jacobins. While Paine championed abolishing the French monarchy, he opposed capital punishment; and he reminded the French people that King Louis XVI and the aristocrat Lafayette had both helped liberate the American colonies from England. Paine’s loyalty to American Revolution supporters and his opposition to their being guillotined incurred the wrath of the Jacobins who had gained power. The Jacobins first expelled Paine from the Convention and then imprisoned him.
Paine fully expected that his friend George Washington would get him released from prison. Paine had dedicated Rights of Man to Washington, and Washington remained popular in revolutionary France. The fiercely loyal Paine could not imagine that Washington would not help him. After all, it was Paine’s The American Crisis that had kept Washington’s troops from deserting him; and when the Continental Congress was questioning Washington’s leadership, Paine had used his propaganda skills in The American Crisis to make Washington appear to be a smarter strategist than he was. Paine also raised money for Washington’s colonial army. However, as is common for many anti-authoritarians, Paine was an innocent when it came to political machinations.
At the time of Paine’s imprisonment, the American minister to France was Gouverneur Morris, and Morris had a grudge against Paine for exposing Morris’s friend’s corrupt dealings during the American Revolution; so Morris had no inclination to help Paine. Also, while Paine was in a French prison, Washington was secretly negotiating a treaty with England that betrayed France; and so it was in Washington’s political interest to have Paine rot in prison, unable to inform the French of this betrayal. Paine narrowly escaped the guillotine and came close to dying of illness caused by his prison stay. Luckily for Paine, Morris was replaced by James Monroe, who immediately procured Paine’s release and brought him into his home in France, where it took well over a year for Paine to recuperate.
Paine, hurt and angered by Washington’s disloyalty, never forgave him. In 1796, Paine published his Letter to George Washington, a bitter rebuke of Washington that included the following: “And as to you, sir, treacherous in private friendship (for so you have been to me, and that in the day of danger) and a hypocrite in public life, the world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an impostor; whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any.”
Paine, Russell observed, “incurred the bitter hostility of three men not generally united: Pitt, Robespierre, and Washington. Of these, the first two sought his death, while the third carefully abstained from measures designed to save his life. Pitt and Washington hated him because he was a democrat; Robespierre, because he opposed the execution of the King and the Reign of Terror.”
Even with his diatribe against Washington, Paine still had political allies, and he would not have been completely shunned and marginalized if he hadn’t published another sensational bestseller. That book, The Age of Reason, challenged biblical scriptures and organized religion, including Christianity. Many of his fellow Founding Father deists privately agreed with Paine’s views about religion but were politically astute enough to not publicize their views and to distance themselves from Paine.
In The Age of Reason, Paine challenged the authority of the Bible and organized religion from a moral point of view, just as he had attacked the immorality of the British system of rule and the French Jacobins. All, for Paine, were cruel and thus illegitimate authorities, and Paine, being Paine, could not back off. He wrote that “all national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.” While admiring the morality of Jesus, Paine dubbed Christianity as a “species of Atheism” for it “professes to believe in a man rather than in God.”
In The Age of Reason, part 2 (1795), Paine’s refutation of the scriptures and Christianity was written, Foner points out, “in a tone of outrage and ridicule . . . in manner designed to reach a mass audience.” Regarding the story of Jesus’s birth, Paine wrote: “Were any girl that is now with a child to say, and even to swear to it, that she was gotten with child by a ghost, and that an angel told her so, would she be believed?”
Paine’s condemnation of Christianity was shocking at the time and remains shocking today for many people. Paine said: “Of all the systems of religions that ever were invented, there is none more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory in itself, than this thing called Christianity. Too absurd for belief, too impossible to convince, and too inconsistent for practice, it renders the heart torpid, or produces only atheists and fanatics.” Paine alienated himself from virtually all Christians, including progressive reformers who had been Paine admirers.
Paine’s 1796 pamphlet Agrarian Justice, unknown to most Americans, endears him today to Left-populists. Agrarian Justice is an attack on the sources of inequality and poverty, which Paine blamed on unfair taxation, inadequate wages, and unwise government expenditures. In it, he spelled out proposals for old-age pensions and a basic income. Agrarian Justice, especially compared to Paine’s previous works, was widely ignored and remains so.
At age 65, in 1802, Paine returned to the United States, as Foner describes, “only to find himself first vilified and then ignored.” A Boston journalist described Paine as a “lying, drunken, brutal infidel.” Even former friends and allies abandoned him. Benjamin Rush, a close friend in Philadelphia, refused to see him. Samuel Adams, also once a friend, issued a public letter denouncing Paine. Many innkeepers refused him service. Foner notes: “Paine slipped into obscurity. His final years were ones of ‘lonely, private misery.’ He was isolated from almost all his old associates and friends, and again began to drink heavily.”
In 1806, Paine wrote, “My motive and object in all my political works . . . . [has] been to rescue man from tyranny and false systems and false principles of government, and enable him to be free, and establish government for himself.” By then, few Americans cared about anything Paine had to say, and in 1809, he died in a rooming house in Greenwich Village, New York City. Six mourners attended his funeral (compared to 20,000 mourners at Benjamin Franklin’s funeral), with almost no mention of his death in the American press. Even the peace-loving Quakers refused Paine’s request for burial in their cemetery.
John Adams, a longtime fierce enemy of Paine’s vision of genuine democracy and of Paine himself, admitted, “Without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain,” and he acknowledged in 1805, “I know not whether any Man in the World has had more influence on its inhabitants or affairs for the last thirty years than Tom Paine.” However, an envious Adams was tortured by the prospect that “History is to ascribe the American Revolution to Thomas Pain [sic].” Adams called Paine “profligate and impious,” and he wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1819, “What a poor ignorant, malicious, short-sighted, Crapulous Mass, is Tom Pains [sic] Common Sense.”
For many years after his death, Paine was either attacked or ignored by the American political and cultural elite. In The Life of Thomas Paine, published a few months after Paine’s death, James Cheetham vilified him as “vain,” “intemperate,” “dirty,” “hypocritical,” “parasitical,” “unpatriotic,” “atheist” and a “copier of ideas.” Cheetham accused him of seducing and abandoning his friend and housekeeper Madame de Bonneville (one of the six people at Paine’s funeral), and she successfully sued Cheetham for libel. However, despite Cheetham’s libelous falsehoods, those who hated Paine and what he stood for, “cared little about Cheetham’s veracity,” Kaye notes, “and his book supplied anti-Paine invective to generations of conservatives to come.” In 1888, Theodore Roosevelt called Paine a “filthy little atheist”; yet, historian J. H. McKenna points out, “Paine was fastidiously clean, stood taller than most of his contemporaries at five feet ten inches, and was a professed believer in God.”
Paine has come to be admired for Common Sense and for his role in fomenting the American Revolution. In 1969, he was honored with a “Prominent Americans” series U.S. postal stamp. But Paine’s historical comeback is based in large part on a convenient neglect for his scathing condemnation of Christianity. As Lepore notes, “So wholly has The Age of Reason been forgotten that Paine’s mantle has been claimed not only by Ronald Reagan but also by the Christian Coalition’s Ralph Reed, who has invoked him, and the North Carolina senator Jesse Helms, who in 1992 supported a proposal to erect a Paine monument in Washington, D.C.”
Reviewing four books about Paine as well as an examination of the historical view of him, Lepore concludes: “Paine emerges in most academic accounts as a kind of idiot savant; savvy about adjectives but idiotic about politics.” Paine is viewed as “hopelessly naïve,” and even “an ignoramus,” and one of Paine’s biographers offers a tentative diagnosis of bipolar disorder.
Among his more anti-authoritarian biographers such as Harvey Kaye, Paine is viewed more sympathetically, as “inquisitive, gregarious, and compassionate, yet strong-willed, combative, and ever ready to argue about and fight for the good and right.” For many famous and non-famous anti-authoritarians, their compulsion for truth-telling makes it difficult for compromises and diplomacy. Foner concludes, “Paine was at his best at the very moment of overthrow, when principles of government were called into question and new classes emerged into political life. But Paine was temperamentally and intellectually unsuited for the day-to-day affairs of government.”
Similar to many non-famous anti-authoritarians, Paine disregarded cautions from friends; and, though loyal to his friends, Paine was more loyal to his own integrity. His onetime friend Benjamin Rush cautioned him against the use of the then-taboo word independence, but he disregarded Rush. His friend James Monroe tried to dissuade him from publishing his diatribe against George Washington, but Paine published it anyway.
Paine was a political ally with Thomas Jefferson in several areas (with slavery being a major exception). However, Paine’s friendship with Jefferson became a significant political liability for Jefferson whose enemies used it to attack him, especially with respect to questions of Jefferson’s own religious beliefs. Jefferson, after he had become president, risked political capital by offering Paine transportation back to the United States on a public vessel (which Paine declined). However, soon after his return to the United States, Paine composed another series of letters reviving his hostility with John Adams and George Washington during a time when Jefferson was attempting to foster reconciliation. Another of Paine’s friends, William Duane, warned Paine not to publish these letters. Duane later said to Jefferson that he had told Paine that he “will be deserted by the only party that respects him or does not hate him—that all his political writings will be rendered useless—and even destroyed.” But again Paine was stubborn, and ultimately Jefferson too severed his relationship with him.
Without Paine’s personal papers, which burned in a fire, it is difficult to know for certain whether Paine didn’t care about the consequences of his attack on Christianity or was naïve about key elements of American society and American politics. Many self-identified American Christians who would have stood with him in his battle for social reforms that he spelled out in Agrarian Justice abandoned Paine because of his attack on Christianity. Paine, like many anti-authoritarians, could not back down from challenging any authority that he believed was illegitimate. But his attack on Christianity deprived him of all political capital to create social and economic justice in U.S. society.
So beyond the personal tragedy of Paine’s later life, there was a political tragedy. Egalitarian Americans who cared about greater social and economic justice and who could have used a politically powerful legacy of Thomas Paine and his Agrarian Justice were deprived of it because of Paine’s attack on Christianity. For Paine, Christianity was a major illegitimate authority, and his integrity compelled him to challenge it.
One of Paine’s few nineteenth-century admirers, Robert Ingersoll, concluded that Paine had “more courage than politeness; more strength than polish. He had no veneration for old mistakes—no admiration for ancient lies. He loved the truth for truth’s sake, and for man’s sake. He saw oppression on every hand, injustice everywhere; hypocrisy at the altar; venality on the bench, tyranny on the throne; and with a splendid courage he espoused the causes of the weak against the strong—of the enslaved many against the titled few.”
While Paine can be viewed as a compulsive truth teller, he cannot be viewed as compulsively self-destructive. During his early life as a societal “loser,” he displayed impressive resiliency. He took full advantage of his lucky break connecting with Benjamin Franklin, and he recognized and used his talent of being a plain-speaking and provocative writer. Despite his sad end, Paine did much right so as to have an extraordinary anti-authoritarian life.
That Thomas Paine’s extraordinary accomplishments in no way mitigated the viciousness of the assault on him is a sad reflection on his society. This dark reality about U.S. society continues to catch naïve anti-authoritarians by surprise—as well as to create anxiety and extreme vigilance for other U.S. anti-authoritarians.
Ralph Nader
“Ralph, go back to examining the rear-end of automobiles. . . and don’t risk costing the Democrats the White House this year as you did four years ago.”
—Jimmy Carter, Democrat Convention, 2004
“Outside of Jerry Falwell, I can’t think of anybody I have greater contempt for than Ralph Nader. No one in the history of the world is on a bigger ego trip than Ralph Nader.”
—James Carville, Democrat Party Strategist, 2006
“The Democrats just totally trashed the guy. . . . They’re the meanest bunch of motherfuckers I have ever run across.”
—James Ridgeway, Journalist, 2006
For Thomas Paine, illegitimate authorities were the British rule over America, hereditary rule, monarchy, the Bible, clerics, and Christianity. For Ralph Nader (born 1934), illegitimate authority is corporatism—an oligarchy composed of giant corporations, the super-rich, and elected officials from both the Republican and Democratic Parties who do their bidding.
No American anti-authoritarians rose to greater national popularity than Paine and Nader, and none took larger falls in terms of popularity. Both, buoyed by earlier successes at slaying authoritarian giants, confronted other illegitimate authorities, and this resulted in both being punished with severe marginalization. Both are “radicals” in the sense of confronting root causes of misery and suffering, but neither are anti-state or anti-government. Both fought for genuinely democratic governments that protect and improve the lives of its citizens.
While Paine biographies do not include illuminating childhood stories of his anti-authoritarianism, Ralph Nader biographies do. In 1938, his mother, Rose Nader, took Ralph and her other three children for a visit to the family’s native country, Lebanon. On the visit, the Nader family stood in line to meet an archbishop of the Eastern Orthodox Church. The archbishop stopped in front of each person who bent down and kissed the archbishop’s ring. This continued, Nader biographer Kevin Graham reported, “until he came to a small four-year-old boy who looked up at the archbishop and shook his head.” The boy was Ralph Nader, who then told the archbishop, “I don’t have to kiss your ring.”
Nader is an anti-authoritarian but not anti-authority. He grew up respecting and admiring his father and mother. His father, Nathra Nader, emigrated from Lebanon to the United States in 1912. Nathra said, “When I passed by the Statue of Liberty, I took it seriously,” resulting in a lifelong passion for speaking his mind and teaching his children that speaking one’s mind was part of being an American. Nathra moved around the United States, finally settling in Winsted, Connecticut, opening a restaurant where Ralph would sometimes help out. One day when Ralph was ten years old and had returned from school, his father asked him: “What did you learn at school today? Did you learn how to believe or did you learn how to think?” Ralph Nader proudly tells that story, and he recounts how his father also told him, “If you do not use your rights, you will lose your rights.”
Ralph Nader is equally proud of his community-activist mother, Rose Nader. Frustrated by government inaction over flooding and destruction in Winsted, when Rose heard that Connecticut’s then-Senator Prescott Bush (George H.W. Bush’s father) planned to attend a campaign reception in Winsted, she waited in the receiving line until she could shake his hand. Then she did not release his hand from her strong grip until she exacted a promise from him to build a backup system that would catch water flowing over the existing dam—and that system was in fact built.
As a boy, Nader read biographies about turn-of-the-century muckrakers. At Princeton, he read an average of one book a day outside of his required course work. He then went to Harvard Law School but concluded, “From day one I laughed at the game—to prepare corporate lawyers. . . . They made minds sharp by making them narrow.” Nader recounted, “I didn’t like Harvard Law all that much. . . . It was basically a high-priced factory. But instead of producing toasters or blenders, they were producing lawyers to serve corporations, and that was it.”
Not taking Harvard Law School too seriously, Nader periodically left and hitchhiked around the United States, researching and writing about the lack of rights of Native Americans and migrant workers. He also started researching automobile safety after seeing car crashes during his travels. He later recounted, “I hitchhiked so much . . . that on a number of occasions, we were the first on the scene of traffic accidents. . . . I saw lots of terrible sights.” He also could not forget about a friend whose car accident resulted in him becoming a paraplegic, and how that could have been prevented by seatbelts. In 1959, at age 25, Nader gained attention with an article in the Nation about design dangers of automobiles.
While many idealistic young people in the early 1960s were drawn to the civil rights movement, Nader began working on a human rights issue that virtually nobody was working on—“human body rights.” Continuing his auto safety research, Nader would eventually publish Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile, and he would come under attack by General Motors and the automobile industry.
Unsafe at Any Speed was published in 1965 when Nader was 31. Nader’s research showed that death and injuries were being caused by cars designed for style and not for safety. Most famously, the design problems of GM’s Corvair caused rollovers and needless deaths. The book provoked Americans to become appalled by automobile executives who were aware of design flaws but did nothing to fix them. Unsafe at Any Speed became a bestseller (and is today listed by the Library of Congress as one of the 88 “books that shaped America”). Nader then became an adviser to Senator Abraham Ribicoff (D-CT) for his auto-safety hearings.
Although there was evidence that the public would pay more for safer cars, automakers did not want to be told what to do. Auto executives did not want to put in the extra expenses for auto safety, and they feared that “giving in” here would lead to acceding to pollution controls, fuel efficiency, and other measures for a healthier society. So auto executives at General Motors tried to shut Nader up.
GM communications records showed that GM wanted to get dirt on Nader to smear and marginalize him. Nader recounted that while in a grocery store, an attractive woman walked up to him and asked him back to her apartment to help her, and after Nader declined, he noticed that she did not ask anyone else. A similar encounter with an attractive woman occurred shortly later in a drugstore. Nader believed he was being followed, and he sounded to some friends as if he had become delusional and paranoid. However, detectives following him were ultimately caught when they asked a building’s security guard about Nader’s location; the guard, himself studying to be a lawyer, got the detectives’ names. Nader later said, “The surveillance became so amateurish in the end that it was almost like a slapstick comedy.”
Senator Ribicoff, chairing Senate hearings, asked the CEO of GM, James Roche, if GM had hired a detective agency to follow Nader. Roche admitted that GM had done so and apologized. Nader later sued GM, with GM settling in 1970 for $425,000 (after legal fees, $280,000), which Nader used—not on himself—but as seed money for his consumer activist groups. Nader has had few financial needs—famously frugal, buying his clothes at thrift stores, never owning a car or a television, and never marrying and having to provide for a family.
Thomas Paine had taken on Great Britain, the most powerful nation on the planet at that time. Ralph Nader had taken on GM, the largest corporation in the United States at that time with larger gross sales than many nations’ gross domestic product. Both Paine and Nader triumphed. Given these triumphs, it is understandable that both these anti-authoritarians believed that they could defeat any illegitimate authority.
At the auto-safety Senate hearings, Nader was asked about his advocacy motives and responded: “Because I happen to have a scale of priorities that leads me to engage in the prevention of cruelty to humans.” For Nader, as was the case with Paine, the practice of cruelty and exploitation most defined an authority as illegitimate. Nader’s Senate testimony was crucial to Congress passing the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act in 1966, which resulted in the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Ralph Nader may well be responsible for saving more lives from consumer product deaths than anyone in world history. The National Center for Statistics and Analysis concluded that from 1975 to 2004, over 195,000 lives were saved just by seatbelts (and many other serious injuries prevented). In 2015, the Nation reported that based on an analysis of deaths per mile driven, the Center for Auto Safety found that, taking into account all auto safety-related measures attributable to Nader, over the past 50 years, he had helped avert 3.5 million auto deaths. Seatbelts are only one of many automobile safety measures that Nader is responsible for, and automobile safety is only one of several “human body rights” that Nader helped bring into existence.
By 1970, Nader and “Nader’s Raiders” (the young consumer advocates who Nader came to inspire and lead) were responsible for the following safety and human rights protections: the Occupation and Safety Health Act (OSHA); law establishing Environmental Protection Agency; Natural Gas Pipeline Safety Act; Safe Water Drinking Act; Clean Water Act; Nuclear Power Safety; Wholesome Meat Act; Clean Air Act; Mine Health and Safety Act; Foreign Corrupt Practices Act; Freedom of Information Act; and the Whistleblower Protection Act.
Thus, Americans owe a good part of the quality of their everyday lives directly to Ralph Nader and the consumer advocates who he inspired. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, polls showed Nader was among the most admired and trusted Americans (behind only Walter Cronkite). At the same time, Ralph Nader had become the man that corporate America feared most.
In 1971, Lewis Powell (prior to becoming a justice on the Supreme Court) was commissioned by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to write a confidential memo titled “Attack on the American Free Enterprise System,” and Powell offered a counter attack strategy for corporate America. Powell stated: “Perhaps the single most effective antagonist of American business is Ralph Nader, who—thanks largely to the media—has become a legend in his own time and an idol of millions of Americans.” Part of corporate America’s strategy was to use their financial power to ensure that Nader and other consumer advocates could no longer count on Democratic Party politicians (who, as with Senator Ribicoff, Nader had previously counted on).
When Democrat Jimmy Carter was elected in 1976, Nader naively believed that with Democrats retaking the White House along with Democrat control of the Senate and the House of Representatives, it would make it easier for the consumer movement. Carter had voiced support for the consumer movement and had even hired some Nader allies. And so Nader was confident of the passage of a proposed bill creating a Consumer Protection Agency (which aimed at providing an ombudsman for consumers and was a popular bill with the general public). The bill passed in the Senate but lost in the House. Nader later said about Carter: “At the critical moment when we needed his lobbying help in the House of Representatives, he did not expend the political capital.” Jimmy Carter would ultimately disappoint progressives by cutting social programs and increasing the military budget.
The Democratic Party in the 1980s began aggressively pursuing corporate money, and this further increased in the 1990s. Even more disappointing and frustrating for progressives than Carter was Democratic president Bill Clinton’s corporatist agenda (e.g., passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, and repeal of the Glass–Steagall Act). However, Nader still was not ready to completely give up on the Democrats. “From 1980 to 2000,” Nader recounted, “we tried every way to get the Democrats to pick up on issues that really commanded the felt concern in daily life of millions of Americans, but were issues that corporations didn’t want attention paid to.” Clinton and his vice president Al Gore refused to meet with Ralph Nader, and Nader could not convince them to support even the most politically popular anti-corporatist agenda.
Finally, Nader could no longer stomach the Democratic Party’s complete betrayal, and he concluded that the United States now has “one corporate party with two heads.” What became increasingly clear to Nader was confirmed by former Democratic Party operatives such as Lawrence O’Donnell (later an MSNBC political analyst) who said, “If you don’t show them you’re capable of not voting for them, they don’t have to listen to you. I promise you that. I worked within the Democratic Party. I didn’t have to listen to anything on the Left while I was working in the Democratic Party.”
Nader previously had declined offers to run for office, and continued voicing a preference that someone other than him step forward to challenge the Democratic-Republican corporatism. However, Nader ultimately came to the conclusion that “this two-party elected dictatorship has turned politics into such a dirty word that the whole idea of elected public service is now distasteful to thousands and thousands of wonderful people in this country. That’s when I said, okay, that’s the final straw. I have got to step forward.” In 1996, Nader ran as the Green Party candidate and got less than 1% of the vote. This did not greatly upset the Democratic Party because Clinton handily defeated a weak candidate, Republican Bob Dole, who was further weakened by the Ross Perot candidacy.
In 2000, Nader ran again as the Green Party candidate for president opposing both the Republican George W. Bush and the Democrat Al Gore. Nader’s goal was to get 5% so as to qualify for the federal matching funds for the Greens in 2004. Given the Clinton-Gore pro-corporatist agenda, progressive Americans were even more disgusted with their two major party choices. Consequently, Nader attracted over 10,000 people at several rallies across the United States who paid to attend so as to contribute to the campaign, with over 20,000 at his event at Madison Square Garden in New York City. But the mainstream press gave little mention to Nader’s enthusiastic support. Nader was frozen out of the debates by the Democrats and Republicans who controlled them—this despite the fact that polls showed that two-thirds of Americans wanted Nader to be permitted to participate. In order to just be part of the audience at a Gore-Bush debate, Nader got an admission ticket but was threatened with arrest and turned away.
After Gore was narrowly defeated in Florida and lost the electoral-college vote to Bush, Nader not only received the expected rebukes from mainstream Democrats but received even greater scorn from so-called “progressive” former admirers of him. One can get a sense of the vitriol of progressives’ attacks on Nader in the 2006 documentary An Unreasonable Man.
Eric Alterman, columnist for progressive publication the Nation, stated about Nader: “The man needs to go away. I think he needs to live in a different country. He’s done enough damage to this one. Let him damage somebody else’s now. . . . To me, he’s a very deluded man. He’s a psychologically troubled man.”
Todd Gitlin, former president of the Students for a Democratic Society, stated about Nader’s 2000 presidential run: “I find this worse than naive. I think it borders on the wicked.”
Since 2000, there has been an ongoing marginalization of Nader by mainstream Democrats and progressives. The progressive website Salon in 2004 stated about Nader: “He’s made a career of railing against corporate misdeeds. Yet he himself has abused his underlings, betrayed close friends and ruled his public-interest empire like a dictator.” This is in contradiction with underlings and friends’ on-camera interviews in An Unreasonable Man, which show that while Nader, like many anti-authoritarians, has at times lacked diplomacy with associates, he has not abused or betrayed them. The treatment of Nader after he opposed the Democratic Party has very much resembled the treatment of Thomas Paine after he had published The Age of Reason.
The politically astute progressive Bernie Sanders has kept his distance from Ralph Nader. Nader reported that Sanders is “obsessed by the way I was shunned. He hasn’t returned a call in 17 years. He’s told people 100 times he didn’t want to run a Nader campaign.” Despite Sanders’s shunning of him, Nader, supported Sanders’s 2016 run for the Democratic presidential nomination. Moreover, Nader showed no ego attachment to his own strategy of attempting to make the Democratic Party more responsive to progressives. In a 2016 Washington Post piece, “Why Bernie Sanders Was Right to Run as a Democrat” Nader acknowledged, “Because if he had run as an independent, he would have faced only one question daily in the media, as I did: ‘Do you see yourself as a spoiler?’”
After Sanders lost the 2016 Democratic Party nomination, Sanders supported the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, who was defeated by Donald Trump (with both Clinton and Trump having historically high unfavorable ratings of over 55%). Both Nader and Sanders attempted strategies aimed at compelling the Democratic Party to become less corporatist. Both Nader and Sanders failed. Yet it is Nader, despite his huge array of accomplishments, who continues to be shunned and scorned by progressives, with many of those who had once admired Nader being the most vitriolic.
For both Ralph Nader and Thomas Paine, actions that resulted in their marginalization are seen by former admirers as “ego-trip” departures from their previous altruistic activities. However, if one examines the arc of Paine’s life, his compulsion for integrity could not allow him to avoid The Age of Reason without feeling cowardly; and his compulsion for courage would not permit cowardice. Similarly, if one examines Nader’s anti-corporatist career, there is also a consistent logic resulting in his integrity compelling him to either challenge the Democratic Party or feel cowardly; and like Paine, his compulsion for courage would not permit cowardice.
Both Paine and Nader were venerated for their integrity and courage by admirers, but when they undertook actions based on integrity and courage that caused their admirers political pain, these same admirers called Paine and Nader selfish, egotistical, and even wicked.
The lives of Thomas Paine and Ralph Nader affirm this: No matter how great anti-authoritarians’ contribution to society and how much they are admired, they remain vulnerable to marginalization for a politically incorrect challenge of authority. If such an ostracism can happen to Paine and Nader despite their monumental contributions, no anti-authoritarian is safe. The anxiety that many anti-authoritarians experience is not a symptom of mental illness but a sense of reality.
While both Nader and Paine had extraordinary talents, they never would have had such extraordinary accomplishments had they not benefited from two of the more anti-authoritarian periods in American history. As Ralph Nader stated about his success as a consumer advocate: “Our movement benefited enormously from the hundreds of thousands of people who were fighting [against] the Vietnam War, and fighting for civil rights, who were in the streets. It created the climate, the atmosphere, that made our efforts appear less extreme.” However, while doing battle with GM was not seen in the mid-1960s as politically incorrect, challenging the authority of the Democratic Party establishment in 2000 was viewed as so politically incorrect that Nader has been ostracized for it.
Thomas Paine likely would have respected Ralph Nader’s reaction to this shunning. In 2006, Nader stated: “I don’t care about my personal legacy. I care about how much justice is advanced in America, and in our world day after day, and I’m willing to sacrifice whatever ‘reputation’ in the cause of that effort. And also, what is my legacy? Are they gonna turn around and rip seat belts out of cars? Are they gonna tear air bags out of cars?”
Malcolm X
“An extraordinary and twisted man, turning many true gifts to evil purpose. . . . Malcolm X had the ingredients for leadership, but his ruthless and fanatical belief in violence . . . set him apart from the responsible leaders of the civil rights movement and the overwhelming majority of Negroes.”
—New York Times Editorial, February 22, 1965 (one day after Malcolm X’s death)
“Malcolm X had been a pimp, a cocaine addict and a thief. He was an unashamed demagogue. His gospel was hatred.”
—Time, March 5, 1965
“Malcolm X today has iconic status, in the pantheon of multicultural American heroes. But at the time of his death he was widely reviled and dismissed as an irresponsible demagogue.”
—Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of
Reinvention, 2011
We see in the lives of Thomas Paine, Ralph Nader, and Malcolm X (1925–1965) a compulsion to discover truth and assert it, a compulsion for integrity, and a compulsion for courage. We see in all three, a compulsion to not violate their trusteeship with the oppressed—a compulsion to not become an illegitimate authority.
Malcolm X psychologically liberated millions of African Americans, validating their anger, encouraging them to assert it, and thus empowering them. For this, he was accused of demagoguery by Americans who did not want to deal with this anger. However, Malcolm X did not exploit his power for personal gain. Ultimately, he was assassinated for maintaining his integrity.
Throughout much of his life, Malcolm X was rocked by trauma in the extreme, and thus the arc of his life is one of the most complex ones among great U.S. anti-authoritarians. As a child, Malcolm was a good student before his family was ripped apart. Then, as a teenager and young man, he became selfish, predatory, and anti-authority. After his religious conversion, he was for a time dutifully authoritarian within an authoritarian organization. But after his break with the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X’s essential anti-authoritarianism was clearly seen.
For Thomas Paine, Ralph Nader, and Malcolm X, illegitimate authority was unjust, oppressive, and cruel. In Malcolm X’s evolution, he first identified white people as an illegitimate authority; then Elijah Muhammad and his Nation of Islam; and at the end of his life, the entire structure of wealth and power in the United States.
It is perfectly logical for Malcolm X to initially view white people as the illegitimate authority. He was intimately aware of a lengthy history of white violence.
Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska, grew up for the most part in Lansing, Michigan. His father, Earl Little, was an organizer and chapter president for the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Earl Little believed, Malcolm X told us, “as did Marcus Garvey, that freedom, independence and self-respect could never be achieved by the Negro in America, and that therefore the Negro should leave America to the white man and return to his African land of origin.” Malcolm’s mother, Louisa Little, also was active in the UNIA, and Malcolm recounts that she “looked like a white woman . . . she had straight black hair” because her father was a white man who had raped Louisa’s mother.
Malcolm X reported that among the reasons his father became a disciple of Marcus Garvey was that “he had seen four of his six brothers die by violence, three of them killed by white men, including one by lynching. . . . Northern white police were later to shoot my Uncle Oscar. And my father was finally himself to die by the white man’s hands.” Malcolm’s family home burned in 1929, and his parents believed it was set on fire by the Black Legion, a paramilitary white supremacist group affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan.
When Malcolm was six years old his father was killed and his mother and the African American community believed that the Black Legion was responsible for his murder. But the police ruled it a streetcar accident, and the insurer of the larger of two life insurance policies refused to pay, claiming that his father had committed suicide.
Malcolm also saw other white authorities destroy his family. The death of his father resulted in the family becoming desperate financially, and his family went on relief. Malcolm remembered that the state welfare employees would look at his family like “we were not people,” and he saw these welfare authorities “as vicious as vultures. They had no feelings, understanding, compassion, or respect for my mother.” He was shamed by peers for being “on relief,” and he began stealing and getting caught for it. Malcolm came to feel guilty that his stealing “implied that I wasn’t being taken care of by my mother,” resulting in her further harassment by welfare authorities. Ultimately, when Malcolm was 13, his mother completely broke down and was committed to the state psychiatric hospital (where she would remain for the next 24 years). At that point, his family fell apart. The children were separated and sent to foster homes. Malcolm X later recounted: “We were having a hard time, and I wasn’t helping. But we could have made it. . . . I truly believe that if ever a state social agency destroyed a family, it destroyed ours. We wanted and tried to stay together. Our home didn’t have to be destroyed. But the Welfare, the courts, and their doctor, gave us the one-two-three punch. And ours was not the only case of this kind.”
In school, Malcolm was also assaulted by white authority. Attallah Shabazz, Malcolm X’s daughter, corrected one depiction of her father by the 1992 movie Malcolm X, pointing out that the film “shows him learning how to read the dictionary as if he didn’t already know how.” The reality was that, as Malcolm X later recounted, “in the second semester of the seventh grade, I was elected class president. It surprised me even more than other people. But I can see now why the class might have done it. My grades were among the highest in the school. I was unique in my class, like a pink poodle.” When his white teacher asked him about his career ideas, Malcolm told him that he’d like to become a lawyer, and his teacher responded, “But you’ve got to be realistic about being a nigger. A lawyer—that’s no realistic goal for a nigger.” Malcolm recalled his reaction to that comment: “I was smarter than nearly all of those white kids. But apparently I was still not intelligent enough, in their eyes, to become whatever I wanted to be. It was then that I began to change—inside.”
In his early teens, Malcolm left Michigan for the Boston area, then returned to Michigan for a short period, then went to Harlem in New York City. During this time, he had menial jobs but also became involved in the world of drug dealers, gamblers, and thieves. He returned to the Boston area, and at age 20 in 1945, he and four accomplices committed several burglaries. In 1946, he was arrested and convicted, and he began serving an eight-to-ten-year prison sentence.
In prison, Malcolm connected with John Bembry, a self-educated fellow convict who Malcolm greatly respected. Under Bembry’s influence, Malcolm developed a voracious appetite for reading. Malcolm’s siblings wrote to him in prison about the Nation of Islam, which at that time was relatively unknown. The Nation of Islam was a new religious movement that preached black self-reliance and opposed integration with white people and that white people were “devils” and inferior to black people. Malcolm was receptive to that message. He became a member, and while still in prison he began a correspondence with its leader, Elijah Muhammad.
Paroled in 1952, Malcolm immediately became active in the Nation of Islam, initially as an assistant minister in Detroit, and he quickly established himself as its most talented recruiter in several locations. Biographer Manning Marable documents that in 1953, the Nation of Islam had approximately 1,200 members; by 1955, nearly 6,000; and by 1961, it expanded to somewhere between 50,000 and 75,000 members. A major reason for this expansion and its accompanying financial windfall was Malcolm X’s breakthrough as a national speaker. He was widely regarded as handsome, eloquent, honest, funny, and charismatic.
In 1957, at age 32, Malcolm X gained attention and admiration throughout black America for standing up to the New York City police following its assault on Nation of Islam member Hinton Johnson. After a large crowd gathered outside of police headquarters, the police backed down, allowing Malcolm to assist Johnson. With tensions mounting, Malcolm gave a hand signal for the crowd to disperse, which it did, resulting in a police officer stating, “No one man should have that much power.” Malcolm had won over the Harlem African American community, and he was increasingly the public face of the Nation of Islam.
In the 1965 introduction to The Autobiography of Malcolm X, M. S. Handler, one of the few white men and reporters for whom Malcolm had some degree of trust and respect, said: “Although he had become a national figure, he was still a man of the people who, they felt, would never betray them. . . . Here was a man who had come from the lower depths which they still inhabited, who had triumphed over his own criminality and his own ignorance to become a forceful leader and spokesman, an uncompromising champion of his people. . . . Human redemption—Malcolm had achieved it in his own lifetime, and this was known to the Negro community.”
As Malcolm’s own self-confidence grew, he began to question, challenge, and ultimately resist the leader of the Nation of Islam, Elijah Muhammad. In 1961, Malcolm X was appalled by the lack of response from the Nation of Islam to violence directed at one of its members by the Los Angeles Police Department. Then he confirmed that Elijah Muhammad, in serious violation of the teachings of the Nation of Islam, was sexually involved with several young secretaries of the organization and had fathered children with them (Elijah Muhammad confirmed the rumors in 1963, attempting to justify his behavior by referring to precedents set by biblical prophets). Elijah Muhammad, having come to see Malcolm X as a threat to his leadership, exploited the political opportunity to censure and sideline Malcolm following his comment about John Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 (“chickens coming home to roost”). In early 1964, Malcolm X publicly announced that he was leaving the Nation of Islam.
Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam was an authoritarian organization that demanded unquestioning obedience, but its initial attractiveness to Malcolm X is understandable. The Nation of Islam validated his feelings about the illegitimacy of white authority, provided him with a strong family (that included his biological siblings who were members), and it provided the previously selfish and predatory Malcolm a spiritual path to care about something larger than himself. Malcolm X believed that he was joining an organization led by someone who truly cared about African Americans. It was only through experience that he came to see that the Nation of Islam was operated by a predatory illegitimate authority.
Malcolm challenged and resisted Elijah Muhammad, knowing full well that the Nation of Islam would strike back. A high-ranking member, Louis X (who became Louis Farrakhan and the leader of the Nation of Islam), stated that “such a man as Malcolm X is worthy of death.” Evidence suggests that the Nation of Islam firebombed Malcolm’s house and then evicted Malcolm and his family from their home in Queens, New York.
Right after leaving the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X founded Muslim Mosque, Inc., a religious organization more in line with traditional Islam. He also founded the secular Organization of Afro-American Unity, which advocated for Pan-African unity. The Nation of Islam had opposed involvement in politics and rejected voting in elections; but Malcolm X advised African Americans to exercise their right to vote, though he cautioned that this might not be sufficient for political change. Malcolm X had not only left the Nation of Islam but had completely intellectually liberated himself from its policies. He had transformed himself into a political thinker.
Also shortly after leaving the Nation of Islam in 1964, Malcolm X made a pilgrimage to Mecca, resulting in his departing from his previously anti-white racist views of the Nation of Islam. He wrote in his diary: “Islam brings together in unity all colors and classes.” Marable documents that Malcolm X had come to believe that God embraced Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike, denied that whites were “devils,” and blamed his previous anti-white sentiments on Nation of Islam indoctrination. The central point for Malcolm X had now become, Marable concludes, “the necessity for blacks to transform their struggle from ‘civil rights’ to ‘human rights,’ redefining racism as ‘a problem for all humanity.’”
When Malcolm X returned to the United States after traveling in the Middle East and Africa, he spoke on college campuses and elsewhere, including events for the Socialist Workers Party and their Militant Labor Forum. Marable notes, “For years, he had preached the Garvey-endorsed virtues of entrepreneurial capitalism,” but at the Militant Labor Forum, “when asked what kind of political and economic system he wanted, he observed that ‘all the countries that are emerging today from under colonialism are turning toward socialism. I don’t think it’s an accident.’” Marable notes, “For the first time, he publicly made the connection between racial oppression and capitalism.”
After Malcolm X’s public split with the Nation of Islam, Muhammad Ali, once a close friend, chose to side with Elijah Muhammad. Ali admitted that part of his calculation was fear, “You don’t just buck Mr. Muhammad and get away with it.” By 1965, Malcolm X realized his days were numbered, and two days before his assassination, he had told his friend Gordon Parks (photographer and journalist) that the Nation of Islam was trying to kill him.
On February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was murdered by a group of Nation of Islam assassins. The New York Police Department, the FBI, and the CIA considered Malcolm X an enemy, and these agencies may well have used infiltrators to inflame tensions between Malcolm and the Nation of Islam. Marable reported that there is also evidence that these agencies, through their surveillance, knew of Malcolm X’s impending assassination but failed to protect him, and then, following his assassination, enabled guilty informants to go free.
Malcolm X was committed to asserting the truth, including the truth of his mistakes. While his views on illegitimate authority dramatically changed, he was consistent in seeking truth, asserting it, and challenging and resisting authority that he deemed illegitimate. It is precisely Malcolm’s capacity to self-correct that makes him one of the most extraordinary anti-authoritarians in U.S. history.
Near the end of his life, Malcolm X discussed with Parks an incident earlier in his life when a white college girl had come into a Black Muslim restaurant and asked him what she could do to help. He had told her, “Nothing,” and she left in tears. Malcolm X told Parks, “Well, I’ve lived to regret that incident. In many parts of the African continent I saw white students helping black people. . . . I did many things as a [Black] Muslim that I’m sorry for now. I was a zombie then—like all [Black] Muslims—I was hypnotized, pointed in a certain direction and told to march. Well, I guess a man’s entitled to make a fool of himself if he’s ready to pay the cost. It cost me twelve years.”
Between 1965 and 1977, The Autobiography of Malcolm X sold more than six million copies. In his 2011 New Yorker piece, “This American Life: The Making and Remaking of Malcolm X,” David Remnick writes, “In 1992, Spike Lee set off a bout of ‘Malcolmania,’ with his three-hour-plus film. In its wake, people as unlikely as Dan Quayle talked sympathetically about Malcolm. . . . Bill Clinton wore an ‘X’ cap.”
In 1999, more than three decades after his assassination, enabled by the U.S. government and applauded by most of U.S. society, the U.S. post office issued a Malcolm X stamp. This was not all that dissimilar from Germany in 1961 issuing a postage stamp for Sophie Scholl, a member of the White Rose resisters to the Nazi regime. In 1943, after she and other White Rose members were caught by the Nazis, her fellow students at Munich University assembled to demonstrate against White Rose, agreeing with the Nazi regime’s promulgation that White Rose members were “traitors and defeatists.” In 1943, German newspapers called White Rose “degenerate rogues,” and Sophie Scholl was guillotined. The German government, 18 years later, honored Sophie with a stamp.
In his 2015 article “To the Memory of Malcolm X: Fifty Years After His Assassination,” labor union and socialist activist Ike Nahem wrote how Malcolm X had been “transformed by ‘mainstream’ forces into a harmless icon, with his sharp revolutionary anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist political program diluted and softened.” For Nahem, this transformation of the genuinely revolutionary Malcolm X into “someone who can be folded into the traditional spectrum of bourgeois Democratic and Republican party U.S. politics . . . is a travesty of the actual Malcolm X and his actual political and moral trajectory.”
The life of Malcolm X is replete with valuable lessons. One lesson is that when we have experienced enormous pain from an illegitimate authority, we may be drawn toward any other authority that validates our pain, and it can become difficult to think critically about that validating authority, especially if we are stressed and vulnerable.
Malcolm X’s attraction to the Nation of Islam was similar to people whom I’ve known who have been assaulted by psychiatry and become attracted to the Church of Scientology, and then become embarrassed when they realize they’ve joined an authoritarian organization. People damaged by one authoritarian religious organization are vulnerable to joining another one simply because it is critical of what has damaged them. This is also the case with authoritarian political organizations. Many people oppressed by authoritarian company owners became anti-capitalists who were uncritical of authoritarian Bolsheviks. The greatness of Malcolm X lay not simply in his courage to challenge and resist illegitimate authority but in his courage to reassess his views.
As traumatizing as Malcolm X’s young life was, he was lucky in one sense. Nowadays, a teenager with a history of stealing would get a psychiatric diagnosis of “conduct disorder,” a severe “disruptive disorder,” and such kids are increasingly prescribed psychiatric drugs. After the breakup of his family, Malcolm lived in foster homes, and foster kids today in the United States are even more likely to be medicated on antipsychotic drugs than other children. And so it is quite likely that in today’s world, the young Malcolm would have been prescribed antipsychotic drugs, and the arc of his life would have been a very different one.