“By 2021, Trump transformed moderate republicanism into an openly radical fascist party advocating the elimination of democracy.”
Tag: Trump
Frances Fox Piven & Deepak Bhargava: “What If Trump Won’t Leave?”
“If Trump steals the election, a broad united front will have to make the country ungovernable and the reigning regime illegitimate, despite the risks involved. … If an illegitimate election gives rise to civil disorder that cannot be easily suppressed, corporate and political elites will move to dump Trump to protect their interests.”
Timothy Snyder: ‘“It’s pretty much inevitable” that Trump will try to stage a coup and overthrow democracy’
“The thing that matters the most is to realize that in moments like this your actions really do matter. It is ironic but in an authoritarian regime-change situation, the individual matters more than [in] a democracy. In an authoritarian regime change, at the beginning the individual has a special kind of power because the authoritarian…
Geoff Eley: “Is Trump a Fascist?”
We are going through “a particularly extreme kind of dual crisis, in which two separate things happen together. First, the given political arrangements no longer work in a way that enables stable governance to occur. Second, those governing arrangements malfunction so badly that they forfeit the consent of the people. That’s the kind of dual crisis…
Ezra Klein: “Trump thrives on heightening the divisions in American politics.”
Winning and governing by division: ‘If Obama’s contention was that there’s no “them,” only “us,” Trump’s contention is that there really is a “them” — a “them” of immigrants and Muslims and terrorists and Black Lives Matter activists and elites and crooked journalists — and so it’s all the more important for the “us” to…
The Editors of “Salvage”: “Saturn devours his young: President Trump”
‘There remains an immense suspicion of political pessimism. Salvage has always stressed that our pessimism, born of analysis, is not at all coterminous with surrender – the opposite – and that it yearns to be wrong. At this moment, this fist in the face, any response other than a pessimistic sense of the growing gulf…
Aleksandar Hemon: “Stop Making Sense, or How to Write in the Age of Trump”
‘The necessary thing to do is to transform shock into a high alertness that prevents anything from being taken for granted — to confront fear and to love the way it makes everything appear strange. Love the new frequencies; what is noise now will be music later. The disintegration of the known world provides a…
Paul Stoller: “Going Public: Resistance In The Age Of Trump”
“In the post-truth world of Trumplandia there is a clear need for scholars to go public—as a form of resistance. This need is particularly acute in the social sciences in which scholars attempt to make sense of the human condition. Why is there discrimination and hate and cruelty in the world? Why is income and…
Frances Fox Piven: “Throw Sand in the Gears of Everything”
“What makes movements a force—when they are a force—is the deployment of a distinctive power that arises from the ability of angry and indignant people to at times defy the rules that usually ensure their cooperation and quiescence. Movements can mobilize people to refuse, to disobey, in effect to strike. In other words, people in…
Jonathan Kirshner: “America, America”
Mourning and melancholy after the defeat: ‘We will now find out. The social experiment on which we are embarking is a treacherous one, from which it will not prove easy to recover. Trump promises a revolution. Trump promises a revolution … Still, even the rhetorical invocation of “revolution” is yet another in an overflowing field…