The trial of Kyle Rittenhouse speaks volumes about the successes of the far right in the United States today. The teen who took the lives of two people and wounded a third during racial justice protests in Kenosha, WI is a hero to Republican officeholders, FOX News commentators, conservative pundits, and the thousands of people … Read more
Hello Readers, Apologies for not having posted for awhile. But here’s a piece on past and future of violent authoritarianism in the GOP up today at the Washington Post: “According to the Public Religion Research Institute, an astonishing 30 percent of Republicans believe that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence” to save … Read more
A report just released by IREHR revealed that an Oregon Three Percent Militia leader is coordinating disaster relief efforts and providing aid to firefighters battling the massive Bootleg fire in Southern Oregon. This story highlights the role far-right militias have been playing in providing crisis services in rural communities in Oregon and elsewhere in the … Read more
On Monday Liz Cheney had her Mr. Smith Goes to Washington moment on the House floor as her Republican colleagues streamed out of the chamber in preparation to remove her as GOP Conference Chair. “I will not sit back and watch in silence while others lead our party down a path that abandons the rule … Read more
In thirty-four states GOP lawmakers have introduced more than eighty pieces of legislation aimed at political protest in the 2021 legislative session. Some of them turn misdemeanors into felonies with serious jail time, others create new felonies in vague language. At least one bill prevents those convicted of unlawful protesting from receiving student loans, unemployment … Read more
Bruce Springsteen’s Super Bowl ad, “The Middle,” has been rightly criticized for selling planet-killing Jeeps in the name of national unity. But even the appeal to the middle itself, in the US context, is deeply reactionary. Middleness – the ethic and aspiration to be neither master nor slave — has historically been animated through, and … Read more
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
“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
“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