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The Rise of the Right Isn’t All Just About Class

You know how everybody and her sister are saying that Trumpism (not to mention Palinism and Buchananism, etc.), white nationalism, and the rise of authoritarian movements on the right is all about class? They want us to believe that the racism of the right is just a ruse, that their real agenda is a class agenda, and responding to it as racism is just hollow liberalism.

Don’t listen. They don’t have their eyes on the long game.

Right wing movements have powerful class implications. We should be concerned about those class implications. In fact, politics should be understood as the … Read more “The Rise of the Right Isn’t All Just About Class”

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On Obama, Drones, Deportation, Austerity, and the Vote

My last post, about why I voted for Obama-Biden in ’08 and will again, inspired some pretty strong criticism. Since most of the commentary has been off-line, and many points of criticism that deserve air time were raised, I’m taking another stab at this to get more of you in the discussion.

First, I have to admit that it was unfair to equate resistance to voting for the Obama ticket with simple disappointment based in unrealistic expectations.

I know there’s more to the protest against Obama from the left than that – much more. A strategy of countering terror with … Read more “On Obama, Drones, Deportation, Austerity, and the Vote”

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The Party Of Lincoln

The Republican Convention played like conventions past, perhaps enriched by an unusual number of outright lies, but otherwise, pretty much par for the course. Planks of the platform controversial among undecided voters were avoided, attacks were launched, and the rest was pablum for the base.

So why watch? It’s a habit. I’ve been watching since the early 1990s when my work involved studying the political right wing. Keeping an eye on the GOP was critical to that work because it was then becoming and has since very much become the instrument of power of a right wing movement bent on … Read more “The Party Of Lincoln”