Interview with Steven Klein for Renewal: A Journal of Social Democracy
On the Genealogy of Trumpism
This morning, I have for paid subscribers an interview I did with my friend Steven Klein, senior lecturer in Political Theory at King’s College London, that appears in the new issue of Renewal: A Journal of Social Democracy.
Renewal was founded in 1992 and just relaunched with an exciting new look and direction, which I think will appeal to many Unpopular Front readers. Here’s a little bit from their editors on their recent renovations:
Renewal: A Journal of Social Democracy is a quarterly journal of policy and politics. From its launch in 1992 the journal has consistently advanced and examined the conditions for a radical and emancipatory vision of social democracy. We are grounded in a commitment to real freedom and equality for all, an end to the commodification of nature and daily life, and the extension of democracy and solidarity across Britain, Europe and the world.
The present moment is defined by crises of capitalism, climate, technology and global order. These are intensified by a crisis of politics itself as people seek meaning and identity in private lives, closed communities and virtual worlds rather than through participation in public life. The moment calls for new analysis, new ideas and new strategies for action. Only a pluralist, democratic and intellectually confident left can bring about the radical change we need, and create the conditions for human dignity and flourishing.
Across the globe social democratic parties face existential political and electoral challenges as they struggle to articulate a compelling vision of the future. In the absence of hope, reactionary parties exploit despair and sell resentful visions of an imagined past. Renewal’s task is to host, initiate and organise reflection not only on the short-term challenges of social democracy, but also on the deeper renewal of its intellectual project, drawing inspiration from both within and beyond our own tradition.
In its latest incarnation, Renewal will publish long-form writing that confronts the challenges of today with an open mind and an eye for detail. Our writing is theoretically eclectic and empirically rigorous. Avoiding mere critique, we offer new policies, paradigms and strategies to an international readership of citizens, activists and elected representatives. We analyse both the possibilities for social democratic politics, and the concrete conditions for their realisation
The genealogy of Trumpism
John Ganz and Steven Klein
What is Trumpism and what does it mean for democracy in America, Europe, and the world? Few writers have done as much to illuminate this question as John Ganz. Through his popular substack ‘Unpopular Front’ and his bestselling book When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists and the Road to Trump’s America, [This will now be entitled When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists and the Origins of Trumpism in the UK — J.G.] he has traced the roots of Trumpism in the fringes of the American Conservative movement. For Ganz, triumphalist narratives at the end of the Cold War masked a new reality: that America was shot through with anxiety. Radical right theorists saw an opportunity to mobilise against the legacies of the New Deal. With communism dead, they turned to defeat a new enemy: liberal democracy.
Beyond his work on the rise of Trumpism, Ganz has written insightfully about the ideology of Silicon Valley, as well as on historical parallels to Trump’s rise such as the Dreyfus Affair and far-right challenges to the French Third Republic. In all of his writings, Ganz combines a keen attention to historical contingency with larger narratives about the nature of modern society. More than anything, he sees Trumpism as an attack on the universalist legacies of the Enlightenment. The question for the social-democratic left is how it can stand up for those principles in the face of oligarchic capture and a wholesale assault on the ideal of egalitarian democratic citizenship.
This conversation between John Ganz and Steven Klein, a contributing editor at Renewal, has been edited for clarity and length.
Steven Klein (SK): You are now one of the leading commentators on the American right and its historical roots. I’d like to talk a bit about your analysis of the right, both in your book and in light of more recent events. But then I also thought we could talk a little bit about the UK parallels. There's an emerging structural shift happening in the UK: Reform, the right-wing insurgent challenge to the Conservative Party that's running on a Trumpy, hard-right immigration politics, is currently neck and neck with Labour in the polls. So it would be good to talk about some of those things as well. But let’s start with your book. It’s been well-received, and it’s part of your longer trajectory of studying and thinking about the right in America. What got you interested in making sense of the American Conservative movement and its fringes?
John Ganz (JG): Like many other people, I was shocked into awareness by Trump launching his campaign in 2015, which seemed to be to a form of politics that was a little different from what had been previously prevalent in the United States. Trump's campaign was related to the rise of what was then called the alt-right, which was kind of an extreme right or fascist dissident branch of the American right. The alt-right felt it had been marginalised in American politics up to that point. It had a different account of how the United States should be governed, and the big issues that right-wingers should care about. I was noticing that many figures who ended up being neo-Nazis or fascists started off in the libertarian movement, or reading hard anarchist libertarian works.