Sometimes the terminological overlap between "democrat" and "anarchist" seduces Graeber into some peculiar historical revisionism, as when he attempts to theorize something called the "democratic unconscious" innate to mankind, a latent force behind populist revolutions and the eruption of democratic spaces. It's just as well he's already outed himself as an optimist: there are less kind terms, after all, to describe his indulgence in a narrative that idealizes pirate ships as the "perfect intercultural space of experiment." Graeber cites the swashbuckling adventure tales told in colonial America as evidence of the power of the democratic unconscious to manifest rebellions at crucial historical junctures, as in the case of the colonists' war for independence. He groups pirate ships with "those spaces of improvisation just outside the control of governments and organized churches" that would compose a real history of the democratic spirit. Frontier communities are another locus of historical fantasizing for Graeber, who cites recent historians' discovery of "just how thoroughly entangled the societies of settlers and natives were in those early days." While this may be true, touting the anarcho-democratic credentials of American frontiersmen feels like an uncomfortably sanitized account of colonization. Moreover, after decades of hackneyed Hollywood narratives of hyper-individualism and violent macho vigilantism, it is disorienting, and a bit disheartening, to see these staples of boyhood escapism — pirates and the Wild West! — repurposed for imagining a post-capitalist future.
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