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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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For Portland, for freedom

As recently as yesterday, William Barr insisted in testimony before the House Judiciary Committee that a federal presence was necessary to protect against “violent rioters and anarchists“ who “had hijacked legitimate protests” in Portland, a “mob” that would surely burn the Hatfield Federal Courthouse to the ground in short order were they to leave. Fearing

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Perilous moment: urban siege as campaign strategy

Trump’s deployment of federal agents to the streets of Portland, and his announced plans to do the same in Chicago, Albuquerque, and other US cities has been widely disparaged as a tactic to reverse his plunging approval ratings and shore up a flagging campaign. Trump himself was quite clear about the partisan stakes involved. “I’m

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Antiracism, antifascism across the Black Atlantic

The murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in the US launched the largest protest movement in the country’s history, growing to encompass an ever-larger confrontation with the institutions and symbols of white supremacy. The movement soon went global, with demonstrations from Senegal to Sweden, Brazil to South Korea. The largest protests after the US

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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