A Critique of Ralph Leonard: Either You Love America or You Love Its Power

Fakhry Al-Serdawi

May 22, 2026

Some of the nicest people I met are American service members and foreign servants; they remind me of what George Carlin said: “I love people as I meet them one by one, people are just wonderful as individuals, you see the whole universe in their eyes.” Back in autumn, I talked to a US foreign servant who was a jock, probably with some military training. The first thing I told him, once I knew his official position and his country, was: “I am sorry about Utah.” It was the same day Charlie Kirk was killed. The guy was startled by what I said and gave it a few seconds of deep thought, and responded with honest eyes: “I am sorry about Gaza.” 

I felt that I owed the people of Utah an apology, exactly because I owe nothing, not a wooden nickel to TPUSA. I don’t believe in organizations or groups, but I believe in individuals, and as a Leninist, I do believe in peoples; the sons and daughters of cities and towns who make civil society possible. I also believe in Kantian freedom of speech, the one that is accompanied by self-legislation, the public sphere owes me not to control what I say, but I owe the public sphere the assurance that whatever I say would be based on a sense of inner dignity.

I owe all civil societies, West and East, a bit of respect. My character building came from the qualities found in all these societies: American Republicanism, Soviet October Revolutionism, and Ali Shariati's modernism, but I also need to remind myself that character building was achieved through my very lucky and undeserved material conditions. 

In this context, American democracy is an important factor in the development of actually existing civil societies and the development of their individuals since the 19th century, but it should not be fetishized as the sole or the overwhelming factor, especially since the development of capitalism is much more abstract than to be hinged on one nation.  I agree with Ralph Leonard that the American Revolutions in 1776 and 1865 caused a great change in world history. But we should recognize these revolutions as a codification of the long historical process of capitalism, not as “earth-shattering events.”

The reason why the insurgency model of the U.S. Constitution is more famous than the reformist model in the 1867 Canadian Constitutional Act is the historical material difference in resources and population, not because Americans are metaphysically “freer” than Canadians; no, the Canadian system of government was impressive, much closer historically to what Marx wanted in his British India thesis.

The American Revolution is exceptional, indeed, but less exceptional than many reifying pundits paint it to be, those who refuse to discuss the very limitations of the revolution, beginning with the fact that it can only be exported by the expansion of American civil society and local democratic governance, through the admission of new states to the Union by Congress according to Article IV of the Constitution. Any expansion of American central federal power outside of this article (see: imperialism) is irregular, existing in a dialectical tandem with the irregularity of opening the doors of the Republic to undocumented immigrants without the consent of the American people. 

Ralph Leonard’s thesis in Compact Magazine is about how the American Empire is not going away. If he is stating this as a response to anti-imperialists (and some Republicans) exaggerating American decline, then we do not need a whole article on how this empire is here to stay; no one sane in mind, who, as Daniel Bessner once said, is reading a book instead of shitposting, thinks that Empire is going away. The real question here is whether Ralph Leonard thinks that Empire should go away, and he does not seem quite excited about such a project. He is not particularly pro-imperialist, but he is, at best, advising intellectuals to follow the theory and practice of non-intervention in imperial affairs.

In that, Ralph Leonard, a non-American citizen, even attacks in his article American citizens who strive for local democratic intervention in foreign policy. But he paradoxically and vehemently is willing to support Palestinians rising against Hamas. He even in November of 2023 supported  Palestinians rising against their Palestinian bureaucracy in the West Bank, as he supports Iranians rising against Iranians, Cubans against Cubans, and Venezuelans against Venezuelans — suspiciously only at the conjecture of the preferred global oppressed of the GOP. And yet, Ralph Leonard does not have the same treatment for America, as he glosses over our task as intellectuals to support American civil society in its criticism of their central federal establishment. 

The Leftists of Compact Magazine, The Platypus Affiliated Society, Unherd Magazine, Tablet Magazine, and some people here at Sublation Magazine refuse to come up with a healthy theory for anti-imperialism; instead, they adopt this tribalistic, irrational stance of non-intervention in imperial affairs while attacking people for not staying in line. This attitude helps push people into the arms of anti-semites, such as Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes, and when this fetishized, vulgar anti-imperialism is practiced, the non-interventionists in imperial affairs use anti-semitism as a scapegoat to justify their position. 

Their other indefensible justification, the need for America as a global cop, is a transition from non-intervention in imperial affairs to the verge of pro-imperialism. This is a problematic justification because, once again, it confuses municipal governance with global governance by confusing the NYPD with CENTCOM (United States Central Command) in the Middle East. It is important to emphasize here that neither Ralph Leonard nor other non-interventionists in imperial affairs are to be faulted for this; it is the mainstream Left that brought to itself such an epistemological disaster when it collapsed the categories of municipal law and policing and international law and imperialism into new disorderly extra-legal public morality forms when it established the Ferguson-Palestine connection in 2014. One has the luxury to think about what would create a world without police when they participate in local democratic and electoral decisions over their lives, including on crime and policing. One does not have such a luxury when millions of Middle Easterners have no say or vote over the existence of the U.S. big state (Army, Navy, intelligence, economic sanctions) in their region.

Ralph Leonard believes in egoism as the basis of communism, making him a libertarian. But there are many kinds of libertarians; there are American law professors like Randy E. Barnett, who believe the US Constitution itself to be too statist for him, and who went into teaching contract law to avoid the collectivist authoritarian tendencies of Washington, D.C., and to focus on the base relations of commodity exchange in American civil society. And there are those libertarians, like Ayn Rand, who thought that the character-building tools Western society grants to the individual require some sort of blind allegiance to Western bureaucracies; those paranoid and pessimistic libertarians want to protect their precious little egoism through the collective ideology of global law enforcement.

Every collective ideology has its own myth; in this case, it is what John Quincy Adams called the search abroad “for monsters to destroy." This myth is shattered by the fact that if Ralph Leonard wishes for global policing, then he must also accept Stalin as a continental cop who helped the United States in its global law enforcement after 1945, especially in Eastern Europe after the crimes of Auschwitz and Babi Yar. And he must accept Iran and Russia as regional cops who intervened in Syria (in coordination with the U.S. in Northeast Syria) at a time of social collapse and the rise of Al-Qaeda and ISIS.

But if Stalin and Assad are monsters and murderers to Ralph Leonard, then he must not differentiate himself from the tear-shedding, moralistic, and emotional anti-imperialists and anti-colonialists. Both seem to replace class struggle with the struggle between crime and justice-seeking vigilantism. Precisely because Ralph Leonard is an egoist in a society of commodity exchange, part of him is searching for a fetishized commodity similar to that which many vulgar anti-imperialists seek: moral comfort through a simplistic sense of this world.