Saint of the Republic: Nancy Pelosi and the Machinery She Served

The Manufacture of a Saintly Legacy

The article under excavation is Lisa Mascaro’s Associated Press report, “Nancy Pelosi won’t seek reelection, ending her storied career in the US House”. The piece announces Pelosi’s retirement from Congress after nearly four decades in office, emphasizing her status as the first woman Speaker, her leadership during major legislative battles, and her role as a stabilizing force in U.S. politics. It highlights her personal resilience, public service, and symbolic importance to American democracy, presenting her exit as a dignified closure to an era of steady, principled governance.

But the tone is unmistakably ceremonial. The Associated Press does not simply report Pelosi’s retirement—it canonizes it. The language is reverent and elegiac, positioning Pelosi as a historic guardian of the republic, a heroic matriarch who kept democracy intact through turmoil. It reads not as journalism but as a consecration ritual, embalming her image for display in the national memory museum before any meaningful historical accounting can occur. The reader is asked to remember Pelosi as a figure of grace rather than as an operator of power.

This sentimentality is not accidental. It is crafted. Mascaro has long written from within the beltway press ecosystem, where critique is polite and power is treated with inherent legitimacy. Her job is not to interrogate the system but to translate it for mass emotional consumption. She speaks the language of respectable political continuity, where governance is always noble, disagreements are merely differences in perspective, and the empire is simply “the country.”

The Associated Press, for its part, is not a neutral institution. It is the primary narrative factory of American journalism—its wire stories form the template from which nearly every major news outlet draws. AP’s role is to produce the “official version” of events, the one considered safe enough for repetition everywhere from CNN to the local nightly news. In this structure, AP acts as a filtering organ: any interpretation that threatens the moral self-image of the United States never makes it into circulation.

The emotional scaffolding of the article is built through personal biography. Pelosi appears not as a strategist of immense political power, but as a mother, a grandmother, a dedicated public servant, a woman who “came to politics later in life.” Her humanity is emphasized as if power, once sentimentalized, no longer requires scrutiny. Even her physical injury is mobilized to generate admiration, turning vulnerability into virtue. The effect is to protect her from political judgment by converting her into a symbol.

But symbols are not neutral. Beneath the soft lighting and commemorative tone lies the erasure of what Pelosi actually administered. The article presents a Congress of procedural debates and democratic heroism, not an empire engaged in war, economic coercion, domestic repression, and capitalist stabilization. The world in which Pelosi governed disappears, leaving only the image of Pelosi herself—carefully polished, framed in gold, and held up to the public as a figure to revere.

The propaganda mechanism here is substitution: symbolism in place of structure. The identity of the officeholder replaces the function of the office. Representation stands in for transformation. Pelosi is celebrated as a “first” in history, while the system she protected is treated as eternal and unquestionable. This is how power defends itself—by teaching the public to applaud the face on the throne rather than ask who built the castle.

And so the narrative lands exactly where it intends: with admiration instead of analysis, gratitude instead of inquiry, pride instead of memory. The AP article does not simply describe Pelosi’s retirement—it tells the reader how to feel about it. It manufactures consent not for her exit, but for her legacy.

Restoring the World That Disappeared

To establish a clear factual baseline, we begin with what the Associated Press report confirms. Nancy Pelosi served nearly four decades representing San Francisco. She was the first woman to hold the position of Speaker of the House, presiding over two distinct periods of Democratic control. She oversaw the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the Dodd–Frank financial reforms, and the repeal of the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. She played a central role in the House impeachments of Donald Trump and became a widely recognized national political figure. These details, while accurate, are presented without the material contexts that shaped their consequences.

What the article does not mention is equally real, far more consequential, and indispensable to understanding Pelosi’s political function. During her speakerships, Pelosi repeatedly approved and advanced H.R. 1585 (2007), H.R. 2642 (2008), H.R. 2346 (2009), and H.R. 1473 (2011), major Pentagon appropriations that extended and resourced the U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. The human cost of these wars has been detailed extensively in the Costs of War Project. These decisions were not incidental. They provided the financial oxygen for some of the largest and longest military campaigns of the 21st century.

Pelosi also backed the expansion and enforcement of U.S. sanctions regimes that devastated civilian populations in Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Pelosi additionally supported the U.S. recognition of Juan Guaidó as “interim president” of Venezuela, aligning with a coordinated regime-change operation backed by Western oil interests and the U.S. State Department.

The omissions extend beyond foreign policy. Pelosi’s public image as a defender of social welfare obscures her role in safeguarding the structure of American finance after the 2008 crisis. Dodd–Frank constrained certain high-risk practices, but it did not dismantle the financial architecture that allowed the crisis to occur. The regulatory horizon that emerged from Pelosi’s legislative period stabilized the banking sector while millions of people lost their homes. The beneficiaries of this stability were banks and investors, not the working class.

Pelosi’s personal financial position underscores the class terrain on which she operated. Her net worth rose from roughly $31 million in the late 2000s to more than $135 million by the mid-2020s, as documented in federal financial disclosure records. Her husband, Paul Pelosi, executed a series of highly profitable trades in firms directly affected by legislation she influenced, including Nvidia and Alphabet. Meanwhile, Pelosi publicly defended the ability of members of Congress to trade individual stocks, stating that “we’re a free-market economy — they should be able to participate in that”. At the time, House Democratic leadership did not advance proposed stock-trading restriction bills, resulting in the effort stalling despite broad public support. Pelosi later shifted her position under mounting public pressure, telling reporters she would be open to considering a ban on Congressional stock trades, but no such ban was enacted during her tenure.

The same disjunction between public posture and material policy emerged during the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings. Pelosi and Democratic leadership staged a kneeling ceremony in Kente cloth, even as Pelosi opposed efforts to reduce police budgets and instead supported increases for Capitol Police and federal security agencies. Symbolic gestures substituted for structural change.

On the domestic front, Pelosi repeatedly backed federal surveillance and intelligence expansions, including renewals of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. These policies strengthened federal monitoring and enforcement capacity during a period of rising public protest, economic polarization, and working-class precarity.

Placed into historical context, Pelosi’s career tracks closely with the major phases of U.S. political economy from the late Cold War through the erosion of uncontested unipolar power: the globalization of finance, the integration of Silicon Valley into national governance, the expansion of the post-9/11 security state, the liberal management of imperial warfare, and the use of representational symbolism to obscure the persistence of austerity, coercion, and international dominance. The Associated Press article, by removing these conditions, narrates a political biography without the world in which that biography operated.

What Power Was Being Protected

When the sentimental fog is cleared and the record is examined materially, it becomes possible to understand Nancy Pelosi’s political career not as the story of an individual leader, but as the expression of a particular class formation. Pelosi did not merely operate within American political institutions—she helped administer, stabilize, and reproduce them during a period of intensifying global and domestic contradiction. This is what it means to belong to what can be called the Imperial Governance Class: a layer of political managers, party officials, financiers, and cultural intermediaries who coordinate the maintenance of U.S. hegemony at home and abroad. Their purpose is not to debate the legitimacy of empire, but to ensure its continuity regardless of who occupies the White House or which party holds a congressional majority.

Seen from this vantage point, Pelosi’s legislative achievements take on a different character. The Affordable Care Act, Dodd–Frank, and other policy milestones did not alter the distribution of power in American life. They managed crises that threatened to destabilize the system. The 2008 financial crash was not an aberration; it was an inevitable outcome of a capitalist order built on debt, speculation, and extraction. Pelosi’s role was to help restore investor confidence and stabilize the economy—not to restructure ownership, democratize wealth, or shift control of productive resources. What emerged from her shepherding of “reform” was a restored equilibrium for banks and corporations while millions of workers were left to absorb the losses privately. This is the logic of Neoliberal Progressivism: symbolic inclusion and representational diversity masking the unbroken rule of capital.

This same logic governed foreign policy. Pelosi’s support for prolonged war appropriations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and her alignment with U.S. efforts to isolate and destabilize Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and the DPRK, reflect not personal belief but structural function. These measures are expressions of Sanctions Warfare—a form of economic siege that seeks to exhaust the sovereignty of nations outside U.S. control by depriving them of medicine, fuel, currency, industrial inputs, and international credit. Unlike open war, sanctions allow empire to operate with clean hands in its own imagination. The human suffering they produce is rendered invisible, collateral, or—more often—morally justified. Pelosi’s career cannot be separated from the global costs of this strategy.

Domestically, the pattern is parallel. Her support for extended intelligence surveillance authorities and expanded federal policing resources reflects a bipartisan coordination of internal discipline. The rhetoric of partisan polarization obscures the deeper reality of the Security-State Bipartisan Consensus: Democrats and Republicans may clash over cultural symbolism, but both actively reinforce the coercive power of the state when faced with social unrest, racial uprising, or labor agitation. The Kente cloth ceremony performed during the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprising was not simply tone-deaf symbolism—it was the aesthetic counterpart to the material expansion of state force. Representation became the velvet glove covering the iron hand of repression.

Once seen clearly, a consistent structure emerges. Pelosi’s public image—progressive, feminist, pragmatic, compassionate—served as a legitimizing veneer for policies that protected capital, enforced imperial dominance abroad, and strengthened the coercive capacities of the state at home. Her gender and symbolic status as a “historic first” were instrumentalized to soften the violence of the system she helped manage. In this, she was neither an aberration nor an outlier. She was the ideal steward for a period in which the United States sought to preserve its global influence while the underlying conditions of that dominance were beginning to erode.

The Associated Press article, by presenting Pelosi as a heroic figure in isolation from these structures, performs a vital ideological task: it protects the imperial system from historical memory. It teaches the public to celebrate the steward and forget the machinery she was responsible for maintaining. It invites admiration where reflection is needed, reverence where analysis is required, and mourning where accountability would otherwise arise. It asks us to remember a woman and forget the world she helped shape.

What Must Be Built Now

If Pelosi’s career represents the refined art of managing decline—of keeping a faltering empire coherent through symbolism, discipline, and selective reform—then her departure marks a moment of possibility. Not because the system is weak in its institutions, but because its legitimacy is thinning. The language that once convinced millions now convinces fewer. The gap between the reality of working-class life and the stories told about that reality is widening. Where ideology loosens, organizing can take root.

This is not a call for isolated outrage or solitary critique. It is a call to link the struggles already unfolding, to recognize them as connected fronts in a shared confrontation with the same structure of power. In San Francisco, tenant unions and neighborhood associations are resisting the privatization of public space and the displacement machine that accompanies tech-finance expansion. In cities across the United States, community bail funds, mutual aid networks, and grassroots anti-repression coalitions have formed in response to state policing power. These efforts are not symbolic. They reflect an understanding that survival requires collective infrastructure, that dignity must be defended at the level of daily life.

Internationally, movements resisting economic blockades and foreign intervention continue to define the horizon of global struggle. Venezuela’s communal councils, Cuba’s neighborhood Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, Bolivia’s indigenous popular assemblies, and the union federations in South Africa and India provide living examples of mass organization during periods of external pressure. The multipolar institutions emerging across Latin America, Africa, and Asia—from trade agreements bypassing the U.S. dollar to regional development banks—are not merely diplomatic experiments. They are attempts to build the material basis for sovereignty where sanctions and coercion once dictated the terms of national possibility.

The task before those in the United States and the imperial core is to connect local conditions of exploitation to these global struggles for autonomy. This means strengthening rank-and-file labor networks within unions rather than ceding leadership to the bureaucratic layer that negotiates compromise with capital. It means deepening ties between tenant defense groups, worker centers, and immigrant rights organizations so that displacement, wage theft, deportation, and surveillance are understood as expressions of the same political economy. It means building popular education spaces—study groups, reading circles, cultural gatherings—that develop shared clarity about how power operates and how it can be contested.

To move in this direction does not require waiting for leadership from above. It demands the patient construction of relationships, trust, cadence, and capacity among those who already feel the weight of the present order. The goal is not to imitate movements elsewhere, but to learn from them while grounding practice in the specific terrain of each neighborhood, workplace, and school. The movements that endure are those that grow from the ground they stand on, not those imported wholesale from distant victories.

Pelosi’s legacy, when seen without ornament, reveals a system that cannot be reformed into justice. But the absence of reform does not mean the absence of agency. It means that agency must be built differently: through solidarity rather than representation, through organization rather than individual leadership, through shared struggle rather than symbolic participation. The empire can no longer promise stability. The future belongs to those who can build power where the state has withdrawn everything except its capacity to punish.

The work is already underway. Our task is to join it, strengthen it, and root it where we stand.