This chapter explores the significance of class and gender for the landscape of genius. While laboring-class and women authors were often celebrated for their genius, that genius was almost always defined and delimited by their specific social identities rather than becoming associated with nature or the nation in general. As a result, landscapes of genius rarely formed around such authors. The English laboring-class poet, John Clare, thus failed to generate a literary landscape despite his strong identification with nature and local place. Robert Burns’s use of Scots dialect and wider identification with Scottish nature and identity, by contrast, established him as a central figure for Scottish nationalism and produced the “Land of Burns” as an early prototype of the landscape of genius. The chapter concludes by exploring the intersection of class and gender. It engages with the English laboring-class women poet, Ann Yearsley, whose proud self-assertion of independent genius precluded her identification with nature; and the genteel American women writer, Susan Fenimore Cooper, who presented herself in Rural Hours (1850) in a social and domestic relation to nature that deliberately dissociated her from any claims to genius or a landscape of genius.

This chapter explores the overall significance of genius in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as it became associated with authorship, the fine arts, and nature in ways that helped produce a new form of cultural nationalism. The Romantic idea of genius supported new versions of both autonomous individualism and national identity, as readers identified through the genius of representative “great men” with the nation. Genius in this way simultaneously individuated and connected, playing a key role in the formation of national high cultures and canons as well as the overall creation of a liberal democratic social order. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, genius also became increasingly associated with wild and sublime nature, naturalizing these newly emerging forms of social identity and laying the groundwork for the landscape of genius.

This chapter explores the significance of race for the landscape of genius in relation to the overall racial construction of nature in American society. It focuses on Frederick Douglass’s attempt to establish his own landscape of genius at his estate at Cedar Hill in Ancostia, overlooking Washington DC. Douglass was famous for his genius as an orator and as an abolitionist and civil rights activist. This chapter also demonstrates his deep immersion in nineteenth-century discourses of literary landscape and nature. By seeking to naturalize his genius in the Cedar Hill landscape, Douglass affirmed not only his full cultural citizenship in the nation but also, as a representative figure, the cultural rights and status of all African Americans. Cedar Hill was memorialized after Douglass’s death and eventually became a National Historic Site, but its racial associations disqualified it as “nature” in the dominant White environmental imagination, obscuring this important aspect of Douglass’s identity.

This chapter defines the landscape of genius: literary landscapes in which the genius of the author became associated specifically with nature. It focuses on William Wordsworth’s association with the English Lake District and Henry David Thoreau’s association with Walden Pond as paradigmatic landscapes of genius in the British and American environmental traditions, respectively. Wordsworth’s connection with Lake District nature was widely celebrated in nineteenth-century Great Britain and the United States and strongly influenced Thoreau’s identification with Walden. The chapter traces the historical development of those two landscapes of genius and the wider impact of their authorial associations. It explores how the Lake District and Walden Pond emerged as iconic sites for the development of an environmental movement, which sought to preserve such landscapes and their high-cultural associations from modern economic and technological development, as well as from the incursions of the urban working class and popular culture.

Conservatives claim that taxes in America are too high. Cross-national data and historical data from the United States raise serious doubts about this claim. As a percentage of GDP, the tax burden in America is low compared with many other advanced capitalist countries. Tax rates for individuals and corporations in America are also comparatively low. Yet conservatives have long complained that taxes in America are too high regardless of historical fluctuations in the tax burden and tax rates, and regardless of economic and geopolitical circumstances. Nowadays, about half of Americans believe that their own taxes are too high. Yet the overwhelming majority feel that taxes on corporations and the rich are too low and that they should be paying more, not less in taxes. Republicans and especially wealthy Republicans are the most likely to be concerned that taxes on corporations and the affluent are too high.

Conservatives claim that progressive taxation in America is unfair to the more affluent because it punishes them for working hard and redistributes their income to less affluent people who are lazy, and therefore don’t deserve it. It is true that some of the revenue collected from corporations and the more affluent pays for programs for the less affluent. But this ignores that even poor people pay taxes. It ignores that most people who receive government transfer payments are children, elderly, disabled, and working people, not slackers. And it ignores the many tax breaks, loopholes, subsidies, and bailouts that the affluent and corporations receive from government – a hidden welfare state – that costs taxpayers billions of dollars annually. In fact, cutting taxes and therefore spending on social programs can exacerbate inequality and undermine social cohesion and political stability, none of which is good for the economy or society. These arguments are supported by cross-national and US historical data.

Conservative myths that justify cutting taxes, especially for the rich and big corporations, persist despite being deeply flawed theoretically and empirically. Why? They resonate with people’s assumptions that human nature is all about pursuing self-interest and that government is a predatory Leviathan intent on maximizing tax revenues in its own self-interest. Sometimes this is true, but evidence suggests that often it is not. Additionally, the conservative myths are ambiguous and flexible, so conservatives can twist them in many ways to support their tax-cutting efforts. They are also simple and easier for the average American to understand than other approaches to tax policy. Huge sums of money are spent propagating these myths through lobbying, political campaigns, think tanks, media, and educational institutions. The visibility of progressive income taxes and the invisibility of regressive taxes and the hidden welfare state make it easy to claim that taxes are unfair to those at the top.

Conservatives claim that high taxes undermine national economic performance. Yet comparisons of economic growth rates across the advanced countries and across the US states provide little support for the idea that high taxes necessarily hurt economic growth. There is also little evidence that high taxes hurt labor productivity or capital investment, or that governments engage in a tit-for-tat “race to the bottom” by competing to see who can lower taxes the most to encourage investment. Furthermore, data do not support the claim that reducing taxes is necessary to improve a country’s international economic competitiveness. Countries can stimulate economic growth, improve labor productivity, and facilitate economic competitiveness in many ways that do not require low levels of taxation. Those that use government revenues to fund education, research and development, and scientific and technological innovation, for instance, do very well even with high taxes.

There are several downsides to having lower taxes that conservatives tend to ignore. Low taxes are frequently associated with worse health outcomes, such as life expectancy and infant mortality. Low taxes are also associated with worse educational outcomes. Less social mobility, lower human development scores, and worse infrastructure are also associated with lower levels of taxation according to cross-national and US data. None of this is good for America’s economic performance or society.