Regarding the analogy to the radical Black and Brown shirts vs. the periphery: it strikes me that MAGA true believers may be motivated by different things. Some want a return to a white supermajority where there's no question who's in charge, but remains open to some diversity. Others want straight up white supremacy. Still others seem to want a Christian Nationalist theocracy. There may be other streams as well, but they're not all pulling in the same direction and sometimes are at cross purposes. Meanwhile, there remains a majority of the country that still wants a pluralistic democracy that multiethnic and multicultural. At some point, it seems to me there will have to be a coercive attempt from one or more of the MAGA factions to grab the reins.
Loved this almost as much as the one with Brad DeLong.
Re the class basis for right-wing support among portions of the working class: it does make sense, I think especially for hardhat union types because the labour movement has been so successful. You're talking about people who are in their working years, able-bodied, and pretty well-compensated. To what extent can a welfare state plausibly redistribute towards those people? To what extent do they benefit from public service provision, when they have good benefits already? If the right is not actively hostile to labour to an intolerable degree, it's easy to see how they'd prefer low taxes. And this is before you consider cultural politics (male, non-college, etc.)
I think this is pretty clear in the divergence of labour leadership & membership in the last US election, and in the Canadian election, where the social democratic party bled rural/blue collar ridings to the masculinist/producerist/conspiratorial tories. As a result it kinda drives me nuts when people use "workers" to refer specifically to hardhat unions when that's a small slice of wage workers.
Interesting chat, but feels like Prof. Riley is moving the goalposts a bit. Nobody argued during Trump 1.0 that *America* was a hegemonic fascist state, rather that Trumpism was a fascist *movement* and asked the question, “What if Trump just says ‘fuck you’ to the law and succeeds in dragging key institutions along with him?”
Personally, I never thought the issue of Gramscian hegemony/consent was relevant simply because controlling those key institutions renders it irrelevant. A fascist regime can quite happily co-exist with the non-compliance of half the population. Indeed, as we see, such a regime is dependent on and energized by citizen non-compliance, because they’ve now secured control of the necessary levers of power to mobilize against troublesome citizens and, crucially, claim legitimacy for such actions.
One thing that probably nobody foresaw was the total emasculation of the legislative branch as a mechanism of resistance or even of political significance. The impeachment hearings seem like a century ago, a remote time when people paid attention to elected officials and considered them a force in politics. Civil society is still standing, but does it stand a chance against a mind-blowingly immense, executively controlled security edifice that refuses to disobey illegal orders?
This is a great conversation. I look forward to more of these posts. Re: Kirk’s assassination as a mobilizing event for MAGA, it occurred to me watching that insane memorial service that the reason they seized on his murder for political ends is that MAGA functions best as a grievance-based, countercultural movement that sees itself as constantly persecuted by the mainstream, hegemonic society (which they absurdly believe consists of civil servants and college professors etc etc.) It’s a huge problem for populist movements worldwide that once they achieve real power they have to maintain that outsider stance. When you control the Executive, Congress and the Supreme Court, how do you portray yourself as besieged? Kirk’s murder was a perfect pretext: ‘see, they want you dead’
Regarding the analogy to the radical Black and Brown shirts vs. the periphery: it strikes me that MAGA true believers may be motivated by different things. Some want a return to a white supermajority where there's no question who's in charge, but remains open to some diversity. Others want straight up white supremacy. Still others seem to want a Christian Nationalist theocracy. There may be other streams as well, but they're not all pulling in the same direction and sometimes are at cross purposes. Meanwhile, there remains a majority of the country that still wants a pluralistic democracy that multiethnic and multicultural. At some point, it seems to me there will have to be a coercive attempt from one or more of the MAGA factions to grab the reins.
Loved this almost as much as the one with Brad DeLong.
Re the class basis for right-wing support among portions of the working class: it does make sense, I think especially for hardhat union types because the labour movement has been so successful. You're talking about people who are in their working years, able-bodied, and pretty well-compensated. To what extent can a welfare state plausibly redistribute towards those people? To what extent do they benefit from public service provision, when they have good benefits already? If the right is not actively hostile to labour to an intolerable degree, it's easy to see how they'd prefer low taxes. And this is before you consider cultural politics (male, non-college, etc.)
I think this is pretty clear in the divergence of labour leadership & membership in the last US election, and in the Canadian election, where the social democratic party bled rural/blue collar ridings to the masculinist/producerist/conspiratorial tories. As a result it kinda drives me nuts when people use "workers" to refer specifically to hardhat unions when that's a small slice of wage workers.
Interesting chat, but feels like Prof. Riley is moving the goalposts a bit. Nobody argued during Trump 1.0 that *America* was a hegemonic fascist state, rather that Trumpism was a fascist *movement* and asked the question, “What if Trump just says ‘fuck you’ to the law and succeeds in dragging key institutions along with him?”
Personally, I never thought the issue of Gramscian hegemony/consent was relevant simply because controlling those key institutions renders it irrelevant. A fascist regime can quite happily co-exist with the non-compliance of half the population. Indeed, as we see, such a regime is dependent on and energized by citizen non-compliance, because they’ve now secured control of the necessary levers of power to mobilize against troublesome citizens and, crucially, claim legitimacy for such actions.
One thing that probably nobody foresaw was the total emasculation of the legislative branch as a mechanism of resistance or even of political significance. The impeachment hearings seem like a century ago, a remote time when people paid attention to elected officials and considered them a force in politics. Civil society is still standing, but does it stand a chance against a mind-blowingly immense, executively controlled security edifice that refuses to disobey illegal orders?
This is a great conversation. I look forward to more of these posts. Re: Kirk’s assassination as a mobilizing event for MAGA, it occurred to me watching that insane memorial service that the reason they seized on his murder for political ends is that MAGA functions best as a grievance-based, countercultural movement that sees itself as constantly persecuted by the mainstream, hegemonic society (which they absurdly believe consists of civil servants and college professors etc etc.) It’s a huge problem for populist movements worldwide that once they achieve real power they have to maintain that outsider stance. When you control the Executive, Congress and the Supreme Court, how do you portray yourself as besieged? Kirk’s murder was a perfect pretext: ‘see, they want you dead’