Thomas Zimmer2d 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 Zimmer2d 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 Zimmer2d 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 Zimmer2d 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 threadHamish Buchanan

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

@tzimmer_history

Apr 7 at 2:02pmWeb