Weekend Reading: I wrote about the pre-history of Trump’s rise, the nature of Trumpism, and the radical politics of white despair – based on John Ganz’s masterful new book “When the Clock Broke”
The Origins of Trumpism and the Birth of the Present.
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thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/the-origin...
Based on Ganz’s brilliant book, I reflect on the nature of Trumpism and how to situate it in the American Right’s recent history; the role of the rightwing intellectual sphere; the challenge of how to approach, research, interpret, and tell the pre-history of the present. 2/
What makes Trumpism so potent, what distinguishes Trump from the rightwing populists that came before him who, at the end of the Cold War, were ultimately kept in check? In Ganz’s interpretation, the insurgency figures of the early 90s embodied different promises. 3/
David Duke and Pat Buchanan represented the ethno-nationalist vision of “real America” as a white Christian homeland; Ross Perot offered “billionaire populism,” combining celebrity, wealth, and anti-establishment furor. 4/
Mafioso John Gotti became a folk hero because he stood for a weirdly comforting form of “gangster patriarchy” and personal mob rule. All three, as Ganz puts it, offered a version of “national coherence that was based on exclusive, strong leadership.” 5/
These were visions of a kind of national community in which a strong leader – a “man of destiny,” in Gramsci’s terms – made sure that the “right” kind of people were included and the “others” (women, minorities) were blamed and put in their place. 6/
The promise of nationalist coherence did not have a unifying champion in the early 1990s yet, the different elements of a politics of despair were still scattered. But Donald Trump represents “a kind of synthesis of all these different features,” as Ganz argues. 7/
