Republicans are trying to build a multiracial right – will it work?
The Conversation

Republicans multiracial right. Joe Lowndes
Republicans are trying to build a multiracial right – will it work?

By Joe Lowndes

Photos of the small “reopen America” protests, which have made the rounds on social media over the past week, have revealed a spectacle as cartoonish as it is macabre: a rogue’s gallery of right-wing groups coming together to share in the spirit of defiance and, presumably, tiny droplets of mucus and saliva. The protests (and their backing by deep-pocketed funders) invited many comparisons to the Tea Party movement of a decade ago. Unlike that movement, these small protests are likely to die out soon. Nevertheless, they have captured something vitally important about how the right is responding to this fraught moment in our recent history.

As jobless claims have soared past an astonishing 26 million with no end in sight, the Covid-19 pandemic may well push the United States into a profound and long-lasting economic crisis. The countless indices of human misery will put enormous pressure on political institutions that are ill-equipped to respond adequately. The onset of this immiseration has begun to propel bold ideas and movements from the left to demand a reorganization of the economy and a fundamental shift in political power. But the right is swiftly establishing its own morbid template for how to interpret and respond to both the pandemic and its economic effects.

Read the full article: https://newrepublic.com/article/157505/morbid-ideology-behind-drive-reopen-america

Article by Joseph Lowndes and Daniel Martinez HoSang

Former Republican South Carolina Governor and United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley launched her bid for president recently in a video that began by describing the racial division that marked her small hometown of Bamberg, South Carolina.

Meanwhile, another presumptive GOP candidate, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, has continued his crusade against “woke ideology,” most recently on a tour of Pennsylvania, New York and Illinois, presenting himself as a defender of law and order.

Taken together, these events present a fundamental question about the future of the Republican Party.

Does it continue to move rightward, exciting its base by stoking white racial grievance?

Or does it pursue a multiracial strategy that can expand the party’s reach?

Recent trends in the GOP suggest that it wants to do both – and that indeed the two strategies are not so much at odds as it might appear.

Read the full article: https://theconversation.com/republicans-are-trying-to-build-a-multiracial-right-will-it-work-199086

 

Share this post

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