Like many people I have spent the last few days glued to the news from the US. The fascinating Trump Train has finally come off the rails.
I will admit freely to feeling a sense of schadenfreude watching what has happened in the US since 2015 or so, partly as a distraction from the pain that my own home country has gone through since 2010 and at the advent of the Cameron Coalition (no; I don’t blame everything on Boris and Brexit, and why might be explained in a future post).
But the US. What is the nature of the Trump Movement? Does it in fact exist as a single movement or have several opportunistically come together to take advantage of the space created by his election?
Well I’m still processing it all, but to be clear – I am very skeptical of anyone who claims that a Biden / Harris presidency will do anything to really address the underlying reasons for the mass growth of conspiratorial anti system thinking – and I am just as reluctant to believe that the vanguard at least of Trumpism represent the downtrodden and oppressed who have long been neglected by the liberal elite – and thirdly, I remain to be convinced that Bernie Sanders would have done much better as a Democratic presidential candidate than Sleepy Joe.
Some of the material I am reading / listening to in order to make sense is below (in no particular order).
Richard Seymour – is it still fascism if it’s incompetent?
Three Way Fight – blog on insurgent fascism
Numerous articles linked to by Matthew N Lyons
Mueller She Wrote & Daily Beans podcasts.
Hard Crackers – The Big Takeover which also cites Mike Davis from here.
Bellingcat on the Journey of Ashli Babbit
There’s loads more out there, plenty of signal and noise; but I would argue that the above represents much more of the former, and less of the latter.
I’ll revisit the subject later when I’ve fully marshalled myself. In my defence I was reading about events in Washington live from areas of spectacular natural beauty and poor cell phone coverage in the South Island…