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/
Trump is the white nationalist, the billionaire populist, and the gangster patriarch, all in one grievance-driven package. This, to me, is the most compelling paradigm of the nature and appeal of Trumpism yet. 8/
“When the Clock Broke” powerfully dissects how the end of the Cold War opened the door for those who emphatically rejected liberal democracy, even as an aspiration, to move closer to the mainstream, and make their case to a mainstream audience more explicitly. 9/
For the rightwing protagonists of “When the Clock Broke,” democracy – any attempt to level what they insisted were natural hierarchies of race, gender, wealth – was the enemy. To the hard Right, liberal democracy wasn’t the “end of history,” it was the end “real America.” 10/
One thing that really stands out about the early 1990s: All the protagonists on the Right in “When the Clock Broke” were convinced that it is not enough to be conservative, that a more radical politics was necessary to stem the tide of leftism, and globalism, and liberalism. 11/
The parallels to what is happening on the Right today are striking. The general sentiment that it is “no longer enough to be conservative,” that traditional conservatism needs to be replaced by a much more radical form of politics, is currently being echoed across the Right. 12/
Such frustration with the conservative establishment is indeed a constant feature of the modern Right that is best approached as a coalition of forces in which more extreme voices have always been advocating for a more radical response to the “threat” of multiracial pluralism. 13/
This approach allows us to trace continuities, but also significant radicalizations: In the early 90s, the counter-revolutionaries still existed mostly on the margins of mainstream politics. Today, the lust for militant radicalism is the defining characteristic of even the rightwing mainstream. 14/
Finally, I discuss the recent wave of 90s nostalgia that often has a reactionary political valence – and doesn’t hold up to the kind of precise, sincere assessment of the period’s historical significance John Ganz offers.
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