Capitalism’s viral load

In capitalist society, the market is an inevitable force to which everything else must be reconciled, no matter how brutal the cost. Yesterday US Trade Secretary Peter Navarro complained to the New York Times that medical experts warning about the effects of ending suppression orders too soon “appear tone deaf to the very significant losses … Read more

The coming depression: imagination and politics old and new.

With jobless claims now past an astonishing 16 million with no end in sight, the COVID 19 pandemic is likely to push the US into another Great Depression. If that is the case, the countless indices of human misery will put enormous pressure on political institutions that are ill-equipped to respond adequately, opening the way … Read more

Magic elixirs and dangerous wish fulfillments.

The purported effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for Covid-19 has by now become a regular pitch in Trump’s daily press briefings on the pandemic. The Chief Executive has focused precious energy on the antimalarial drug despite no real research to support its use and plenty of evidence of its potential harm. It has even … Read more

Viral Mutations: The Right’s Shifting Targets.

As the pandemic enters its most deadly phase in the United States, responses on the right have for the most part also shifted to accommodate what can no longer be denied about its catastrophic effects. Two weeks ago, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens warned that “overreaction” to the virus through suppression measures might itself … Read more

The national stockpile

Jared Kushner’s insistence that a federal stockpile of medical supplies is not meant for use by states reflects the odd nationalism of the Trump administration. Facing outward it treats other nations as hostile rivals. Facing inward – like an inverted Jacksonianism – it sees subnational states and localities that make up the nation as greedy … Read more

Necroliberalism

It seems inevitable that as the US and global economic picture continues to worsen (confirmed dramatically by every conceivable indicator) there will be intensifying demands for the state to intervene and create a temporary welfare state. That kind of thinking destroys the longstanding neoliberal consensus in both parties. And Republicans in the Senate quite clearly … Read more

Producers Parasites Patriots, Race, and the New Right Wing Politics of Precarity

In exploring the contemporary politics of whiteness, Daniel Martinez HoSang and Joseph E. Lowndes offer a powerful analysis of white precarity embedded in an antiracist critique of white supremacy in multicultural times. Producers, Parasites, Patriots is a necessary and welcome work.

 Cristina Beltrán, New York University

Race and American Political Development by Joe Lowndes

“This important volume places race at the center of political development in America. Leading lights and fresh voices in the field sweep across the history exploring new ways to think about the impact of racial division on the shape of the political order and the dynamics of its change. There is no better introduction to this subject, one of the massive facts of the American experience.”

Stephen Skowronek, Pelatiah Perit Professor of Political and Social Science, Yale University

From the New Deal to the New Right

“Evocative and analytical, this historical portrait shows how racial change in the South opened the door to conservative mobilization. Its powerful account of how a cross-regional alliance of white supremacists and business-oriented anti-New Dealers fundamentally reoriented American politics advances our understanding not just of pathways to the present, but of prospects for the future.”

Ira Katznelson, author of When Affirmative Action Was White