Mastodawn

ICYMI over the Easter weekend:

I wrote about why Murray Rothbard and Francis Fukuyama are crucial context for the Right’s assault on birthright citizenship, about how we conceptualize progress in history, and about the possibility of democratic change:

https://steady.page/en/democracyamericana/posts/0999474f-9069-4edc-8afa-14ba857741fa

No Right Is Ever Safe – but Progress Is Possible

The outrageous assault on birthright citizenship should prompt us to reflect on the fragility of democratic progress - and our own responsibility to defend it

Steady

Thomas Zimmer 1d ago

“We shall repeal the twentieth century”: That’s how self-identified “radical reactionary” Murray Rothbard described the Right’s vision in 1992.

This really is the core goal of the radical Right: Roll back whatever racial and social progress has been achieved over the past century and a half.

Thomas Zimmer 1d ago

It sounds outlandish. To most people who aren’t professionally obligated to analyze the extreme Right, it must seem bizarre that anyone would really be devoted to such a brutally retrograde idea. But that’s where we are: No right, nothing the mainstream would consider “progress” is safe.

Thomas Zimmer 1d ago

The goal, ultimately, is to turn the clock back to *before* the Reconstruction Amendments. That doesn’t mean re-instituting slavery, exactly. But it means fully re-orienting the coercive powers of government towards upholding strict hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth.

Thomas Zimmer 1d ago

The lesson from U.S. history, if there is one, is not that progress is impossible. There has been tremendous progress at times!

But we must not assume directionality in history. There is no arc, there is no linear progression, no utopian end goal we are somehow destined to reach.

Thomas Zimmer 1d ago

You know who understands that racial and social progress has been real? The American Right. Their radicalization has been fueled by a pervasive sense of being under siege. They are not attacking out of a sense of strength, but because they are feeling their backs against the wall.

Thomas Zimmer 1d ago

We need to accept that things can change – in either direction: It really could get much, much worse. But it could also get better.

There is nothing inevitable about either doom or progress. We are neither fated nor guaranteed to experience the status quo for all eternity.

Thomas Zimmer 1d ago

At the end of the Cold War, just when Murray Rothbard proclaimed that the time was ripe for the radical Right to “repeal the twentieth century,” the political establishment bought into a complacent sense of liberal democracy’s inevitability at what Fukuyama called the “end of history.”

Thomas Zimmer 1d ago

It was hard for mainstream observers to imagine anything but a liberal democratic future, a perpetuated status quo. The political center eagerly bought into the posthistorical framework and governed as if the grand ideological struggles for a better world were a thing of the past.

Thomas Zimmer 1d ago

But far from enshrining liberal democracy forever, the end of the Cold War actually created the conditions for a more open, more explicit anti-democratic politics to (re-) gain mainstream credibility.

Thomas Zimmer 1d ago

To an ascending radical Right, any attempt at leveling what they insisted were “natural” hierarchies was and is the real enemy. To them, liberal democracy wasn’t the “end of history,” it was the destruction of the only version of America they were willing to accept. And so, they resolved to fight it.

Thomas Zimmer 1d ago

Let us believe them when they say they want to “repeal the twentieth century.”

And understand that whether or not enough people can be convinced to defend the vision of egalitarian pluralism with equal ferocity and conviction may well decide the fate of democracy.

Woozle Hypertwin 21h ago

@tzimmer_history The more I look at the utter sincerity of the Right's intense antipathy torwards egalitarian ideas, its emotional need for coercive control, the more I think we really cannot all live peaceably under the same government.

I guess what I'm still wondering is whether their ideas would still have as much support if more of the supporters understood what they were supporting, understood the truth of the lies on which that support is based.

....and if the answer is "no", is there any sustainable way to ensure that they do come to understand it, and do not forget it, so that the Right can never again get this close to achieving their sadistic dreams.

The Doctor 1d ago

@tzimmer_history May I quote you on that?

Thomas Zimmer 1d ago

@drwho I wrote this in the piece and I mean what I write. So, yeah, certainly.

The Doctor 1d ago

@tzimmer_history Thank you very much.

I always ask. Consent is important.

Roy -- the dull one 1d ago

@tzimmer_history

Thanks for illuminating a great political-historical fallacy.

It is depressing to hear public voices say that fascist demolition of democracy is "on the wrong side of History". Some folks may hear that and relax, thinking History will gallop onto the battlefield and save us.

Meanwhile, fascists are saying "The winners write the History", and they aren't wrong. Their grand fallacy is the assumption that the victories they have today will be forever, if they are ruthless.

Hamish Buchanan 1d ago

Slavery already survives in the prisoner-industrial complex, but the goal is definitely to expand that.

@tzimmer_history

kravietz 🦇1d ago

@tzimmer_history

Very interesting reading… I had an impression for a long time that what Trump is trying to achieve is reversal of the US idea of state based on rule of law and return to the Wild West. But I’m missing the curriculum on US history and legal system to fully connect the dots so very pleased to see someone conduct the analysis in a proper way.

If I can add something from my area of expertise, I think Trump and MAGA had one more valuable inspiration - Putin. It was Putin has actually reconstructed this feudal system in Russia since 1999 after deconstructing the rule of law Russia briefly tried to build from 1991 to around 2003 but failed.

Trump seems to be genuinely bored by the whole “woke babbling” at parliament, all the trade-offs of the legislative process, lost elections (!) and everything else we tend to describe as democratic institutions. Trump also seems to be very much fascinated by the one feature Putin has - decisiveness - even if otherwise he’s rather a failure as it comes to delivering declared economic and social promises.

What we are watching now is Trump having the very decisiveness he loved in Putin - and he doesn’t seem to care that in both cases it’s primarily decisiveness to make bold yet completely failed decisions…

Crispy Gnome Chomsky 1d ago

@tzimmer_history I get that human and reproductive rights and vaccines are on the cutting block, but will we be allowed to keep antibiotics, internal combustion engines, and bicycles?

Thomas Zimmer 1d ago

@rose In describing Nazism in Germany, Jeffrey Herf coined the term “reactionary modernism” to describe the weird combination of extreme anti-modern resentments with enthusiasm for some form of technological innovation. I think that’s a helpful concept here.

AccordionBruce 1d ago

@rose @tzimmer_history
Bicycles are a wedge issue in Canadian right wing politics, where abortion and gun control have mostly been off the table

So don’t get comfortable

The issue is not important

Trans-rights only became a target after abortion got checked off their list

Once they ban vaccines, who knows where they’ll go

Colman Reilly 1d ago

@tzimmer_history they’re counter-revolutionaries.