Excellent political theory and analysis of why conservative Latinos support Trump by Dr. Alfonso Gonzales Toribio, professor of Ethnic Studies and director of the Latin American Studies Program at UC Riverside. To this, I would add their own lack of understanding of history that Trump exploits as follows:

"The point of the MAGA slogan is to bury history with its deep class and racial disparities and to conceal the crises of our time: savage inequality, climate change, pandemics and racial conflict."

His approach is seductive to those that have internalized racism—meaning that they have adopted the dominant, pejorative image of their group—and that, as a consequence, need someone to blame. 

-Angela Valenzuela

#vote2020

#EthnicStudiesNow

#SayNoToFascism #Fascism

Op-Ed: Trump’s ‘historic bloc,’ like fascist movements, unifies groups with opposing interests

By ALFONSO GONZALES TORIBIO

SEP. 29, 2020

4 AM

How is it that working-class whites and a significant number of Latinos could support Donald Trump, a self-aggrandizing billionaire with nothing in common with them and little understanding of their lives?

The Italian political theorist and leader Antonio Gramsci asked a similar question about the appeal of fascism among the working class. Why was it that fascism, a project that favored the capitalist class, could have so much support among working-class people, who by the conventional wisdom of the time were expected to side with the left? This was the fundamental question that Gramsci contemplated in his famed prison notebooks, written from his cell after his arrest by the Italian fascist government in 1926.

To describe this dynamic, Gramsci put forward the idea of the “historic bloc,” among other concepts, to explain the unification of a constellation of groups with opposing interests into an apparently seamless front. Such a bloc, he argued, blurs the lines between the state and society and functions to repress dissent in moments of crisis and intense labor and social-movement militancy, like the one we are living in now.

These blocs congeal by demonizing their enemies foreign and domestic, declare states of emergency and criminalize legitimate social protest in the name of national unity. They can unleash a viciousness among the state security forces and among armed citizens. Such blocs don’t have to be based on truth, facts or coherent arguments.

Never rational, such authoritarian movements are based on pure emotion and a sort of identity politics of the right, using common-sense ideas about how the world works among the working class to draw them from the left. The bloc depends on an intense identification with a strong-man leader, the romanticizing of violence for resolving conflicts and a selective reading of history and national culture that appeals to groups that find protection by joining the bloc even if in a subordinate position.

Although the base of the Trumpian bloc is overwhelmingly white and male, 26% of Latinos support Trump over Biden. Many conservative Latinos identify with macho political posturing, pro-2nd Amendment rhetoric, simple law-and-order solutions to complex problems, demonization of the left and disdain for the Black Lives Matter movement.

This bloc, under the “Make America Great Again” banner, requires its supporters — particularly subordinate groups — to accept a degree of cognitive dissonance in submitting to the emotional appeal to a mythical moment of American greatness. For many of the white working class, that moment is before the rise of the civil rights movement, Latino immigration and multiculturalism, the idea that diverse people should have representation and rights in pluralist society.

For right-wing Latinos, this means ignoring both the historical and the contemporary injustices inflicted on their community, such as the lynching of Mexicans by the Texas Rangers in the 1920s, the deportation of at least 1 million Mexicans in the 1950s, the separation of children from their parents at the border or the alleged coerced hysterectomies of Latina migrant women in immigration detention centers now.

The point of the MAGA slogan is to bury history with its deep class and racial disparities and to conceal the crises of our time: savage inequality, climate change, pandemics and racial conflict.

Racism and xenophobia have historically provided the ideological glue that has kept the white working class supporting the most rabid sectors of the capitalist class and from seeing their fate linked with racial others and immigrants. Even during the current economic disaster, it is easier for many working-class whites to identify with the Trumpian bloc, led by a billionaire rooted in the transnational capital class, than to have a sense of solidarity with Latinos or Black people.

Historic blocs of the right emerge precisely at that moment when the left is strong and when the right decides to stop playing by the rules of liberal democracy, the system for resolving conflicts through representative government and respect for individual rights.

These are dangerous times that compel us to recall the fascist bloc that emerged in Italy as a reaction to the Biennio Rosso, the great workers movement of 1919 and 1920, when workers took over factories and continued production in defiance of the owners.

It emerged in Germany on the heels of the Weimar Republic, a liberal government, in the context of intense labor struggles and one of the strongest communist parties in Western Europe at the time. And in the 1930s, authoritarian blocs in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic led to dictatorships and brutal repression that lasted for much of the 20^th century.

In the name of redeeming a victimized nation, fascist leaders like Mussolini and Hitler created historic blocs that destroyed liberal democratic institutions, outlawed dissent and even murdered their opposition, and channeled the anger of the working class into an ultra-nationalist project at the service of capital. Fascism eventually led to the collapse of democracies in Italy, Germany, Spain and Portugal and the death of 85 million people by the end of World War II.

These are unprecedented times, with a pandemic raging, millions unemployed, rising hunger and poverty, racial tensions and clashes between police and protesters. The stability of the imperfect American democratic experiment is being threatened by a historic bloc that empowers the president to undermine democratic institutions and promote the use of violence against protesters and dissenters in the name of law and order.

Trump maybe created new symbols, like his red MAGA hat, and slogans to try to differentiate himself from the fascisms of the 20^th century. But Robert O. Paxton, a leading historian of fascism, has noted in his classic book “The Anatomy of Fascism” that “a fascism of the future — perhaps an emergency response to some still unimagined crisis — need not resemble classical fascism perfectly in its outward signs and symbols” to be any less dangerous.

Alfonso Gonzales Toribio is a political theorist and associate professor of ethnic studies and director of the Latin American Studies Program at UC Riverside. He is the author of “Reform Without Justice: Latino Migrant Politics and the Homeland Security State.”

The optimistic agonist: an interview with Bonnie Honig

Great political theory here with political science scholar, Dr. Bonnie Honig, where she is interviewed by Nick Pearce of Open Democracy. There is a lot to her work and to this interview, but I'd like to hone in on the temptation or desire that some folks have of a world without politics, wanting to believe that politics ultimately results in a world where everything is ultimately resolved. Were life so simple...

What such people may forget, however, is that private life is itself political, meaning that "the personal is political," as many feminists have said over the years. Such individuals, she says, are likely to be pessimistic and cynical toward politics, because withdrawal is their goal.

If you expect agonism, however, you assume no such end state and that the struggle for public goods is a constant in a democracy "

Agonism, however, doesn't have to be either pessimistic or cynical, she emphasizes.  Nor is it always, as Honig states, "oppositional or inherently contestational." Rather it is assumed to be a way of life and hopeful in the sense that "agonists hope that we can experience political engagement with pleasure and joy as well as the attending frustration that always comes with the friction of life in common."

Enjoy!

-Angela Valenzuela

The optimistic agonist: 

an interview with Bonnie Honig

Bonnie Honig is the author of Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Cornell, 1993), Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, 2001) and Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy (Princeton, 2009). Honig’s latest book, Antigone, Interrupted, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. She was interviewed for Juncture by IPPR director, Nick Pearce. 

7 March 2013

Nick Pearce: What’s noticeable about your work is that you have an engagement with continental theory which isn’t typical of Anglo-Saxon political philosophy. Where does that come from?

Bonnie Honig: In the mid to late ‘80s I was in graduate school at John Hopkins University, where French theory was quite central to the humanities and the humanistic social sciences. Reading in that literature you take on board some of its conceptual apparatus, even if you are establishing your own relationship with it. So certain terms, like interpellation and discipline and normalisation, entered into my own vocabulary.

What It Means to Be Liberal by Michael Walzer in Dissent Spring 2020

If you like political theory, you'll want to sink your teeth into this piece by editor emeritus of Dissent, Michael Walzer, who tries to set the record straight in a thick read that's good for the college classroom.  The words, “liberal" and "liberalism," are concepts that we use casually often while assuming that others know what we mean when we use them.

Walzer's article demands that we step back to consider—as he illuminates in detail—the complexities of the concepts, “liberal" and "liberalism," while conceptually sorting out their various strands. 

I like his view that the word, "liberal," is best understood as a "pluralizing adjective," a descriptor with moral underpinnings, that plays out differently across social, cultural, economic, and political contexts.  Expressed differently, he suggests that liberalism is less about who we are and more about "how we enact our ideological commitments." 

-Angela Valenzuela

What It Means to Be Liberal

Like all adjectives, “liberal” modifies and complicates the noun it precedes. It determines not who we are but how we are who we are—how we enact our ideological commitments.

Michael Walzer  Spring 2020

The construction of the Statue of Liberty in Paris (Branger/Roger Viollet via Getty Images)

Is liberalism an “ism” like all the other “isms”? I think it once was. In the nineteenth century and for some years in the twentieth, liberalism was an encompassing ideology: free markets, free trade, free speech, open borders, a minimal state, radical individualism, civil liberty, religious toleration, minority rights. But this ideology is now called libertarianism, and most of the people who identify themselves as liberals don’t accept it—at least, not all of it. Liberalism in Europe today is represented by political parties like the German Free Democratic Party that are libertarian and right-wing, but also by parties like the Liberal Democrats in the UK that stand uneasily between conservatives and socialists, taking policies from each side without a strong creed of their own. Liberalism in the United States is our very modest version of social democracy, as in “New Deal liberalism.” This isn’t a strong creed either, as we saw when many liberals of this kind became neoliberals.

“Liberals” are still an identifiable group, and I assume that readers of Dissent are members of the group. We are best described in moral rather than political terms: we are open-minded, generous, tolerant, able to live with ambiguity, ready for arguments that we don’t feel we have to win. Whatever our ideology, whatever our religion, we are not dogmatic; we are not fanatics. Democratic socialists like me can and should be liberals of this kind. I believe that it comes with the territory, though, of course, we all know socialists who are neither open-minded, generous, nor tolerant.

But our actual connection, our political connection, with liberalism has another form. Think of it as an adjectival form: we are, or we should be, liberal democrats and liberal socialists. I am also a liberal nationalist, a liberal communitarian, and a liberal Jew. The adjective works in the same way in all these cases, and my aim here is to describe its force in each of them. Like all adjectives, “liberal” modifies and complicates the noun it precedes; it has an effect that is sometimes constraining, sometimes enlivening, sometimes transforming. It determines not who we are but how we are who we are—how we enact our ideological commitments.