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The GOP, the Far Right, and the Transformation of the Party System

There has been a lot of debate, particularly on the left, over whether the Republican party is disorganized and flagging, or if it remains a powerful and threatening political force. But perhaps the question of its current political weakness or strength addresses the wrong question. The far-right takeover of the GOP might hurt it electorally,

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Under the Blacklight: If Hindsight is 2020…

Please join us tomorrow (Wednesday) at 8pm est for a new Under the Blacklight panel discussion which will examine the events of January 6 – both the Georgia victory and far-right capitol takeover – in the context of both democratic struggle and white supremacy. With: Kimberlé Crenshaw, the Co-Founder and Executive Director of the African

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Small Axe and the legacies of Black culture and resistance in the UK

Steve McQueen’s Small Axe, the new anthology series about Black British life in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s (available on Amazon Prime in the US) has had critical acclaim heaped on it, and rightly so. The series offers a window on to an important era whose protagonists nurtured radical visions, produced and consumed new genres

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The Birther Roots of the Post-Election Crisis

The GOP’s post-election strategy is currently to pursue a version of what happened in 2000: to have the Supreme Court intervene as it did in the Bush v Gore Supreme Court decision that delivered the presidency to George W. Bush in the wake of contested election results. But when Biden takes the oath of office

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Shadow Coup

McConnell, McCarthy, Cruz, Paul, Graham and other Republican leaders denying Biden’s victory all know that the election won’t actually be overturned. Barr knows that his egregious move of bringing the DOJ in to investigate voter fraud won’t overturn it either. This isn’t a coup attempt. Probably the only person who thinks Trump can still win

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The GOP had an uneasy relationship with the far right. Until Trump.

Hi Folks, I have a new piece in the Washington Post on the history of the Republican Party and the far right, and what it means today. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/09/16/gop-far-right-trump/ In case you hit a paywall, here’s the text: “I put out, ‘When are you going to go get him?’ And the U.S. Marshals went in to

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Murdering Democracy in Kenosha

The first night of the 2020 Republican National Convention featured Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the couple famous for pointing guns at Black Lives Matter protestors in front of their mansion in St. Louis. The next night, armed right-wing vigilantes confronted Black Lives Matter protestors in Kenosha, WI, where two people were shot to death and

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Presidential coup in November?

What is the risk that Trump negates the results of the election in November and stays in office? It isn’t likely that he could simply refuse to leave office if he lost. The other branches of national government – Congress and the Supreme Court would likely stand against him out of basic commitments to bourgeois

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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