Thomas Zimmer21h ago

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
Show threadThomas Zimmer21h 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.

Show threadThomas Zimmer21h 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.
Show threadThomas Zimmer21h 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.
Show threadThomas Zimmer21h 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.

Show threadThomas Zimmer21h 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.
Show threadThomas Zimmer21h 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.

Show threadThomas Zimmer21h 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.”
Show threadThomas Zimmer21h 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.
Show threadThomas Zimmer
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.
Apr 7 at 1:26pmIvory for iOS
Show threadThomas Zimmer21h 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.
Show threadThomas Zimmer21h 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.

Show threadWoozle Hypertwin11h 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.