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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Roy -- the dull one

@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.