Storming the Capitol
Added 2021-01-07 05:08:47 +0000 UTCMatt and Sam respond to a mob of Trump supporters stopping the certification of Electoral College votes by charging into the Senate and House chambers. It was an unprecedented act that struck at the very heart of American democracy, such as it is. Who is to blame? What will its effects be? Will Republicans pay a price for encouraging belief that the presidential election was fraudulent? And what are the role of rightwing intellectuals in this madness? Your hosts break it all down at the end of deranged day.
Comments
Never heard of that podcast, thank you
Kristina M.
2021-01-11 16:58:19 +0000 UTCWorth listening to if you haven't: https://soundcloud.com/alabpodcast/episode-17-liberate-michigan
Ave
2021-01-11 03:16:44 +0000 UTCRe: the cognitive dissonance of taking the idiocy seriously, I re-listened to the ALAB episode on the attempted kidnapping of the governor of Michigan and I think what they say makes a lot of sense, about these right-wingers not really experiencing much danger from the sharp end of the state, which allows for and even encourages a lot of sloppiness and theatricality. This also makes sense of the absolute shocked reaction I've seen from some on the right (screenshots from Parler so obviously take with a grain of salt) at seeing LO coming at them a bit.
Ave
2021-01-11 03:15:44 +0000 UTCAm late to the party here as always, but just a couple comments: Really appreciate that awful sense you identified that I’m being dared to take trumpism seriously, essentially that I’m being conned/owned. We are. But is the notion of “pre-fascism” useful here, in recognition that Trump and right wing media are doing the necessary spade-work of destroying any sense of shared objective truth for the fascists yet to come? And one further comment: you go on later to say that the capital rioters cannot be compared to blm uprisings, because this act was being struck against the institutional symbol of democracy. While I agree with that, I’m sure the rioters do not. I suspect they see the capital as the primary symbol of a wealthy, scornful, ruling elite, even of the “deep state”. They also see storefronts as symbols of the “real america”, the hard working entrepreneurial class, not as BLM protesters do, as tools for the extraction of wealth from the black community. Beyond the avowed white supremacists and truly debased power grifters like Hawley, I suspect and fear there’s a large swath of Americans who see the symbolism of the capital (and storefronts) as the rioters do. This is how deep the trumpian wreckage is: there are no symbols left that have a common valence across the political spectrum. Don’t you think?
Carpenters Gothic
2021-01-10 20:13:09 +0000 UTCGreat episode.
Brandon Coulter
2021-01-09 15:28:57 +0000 UTCThank you for this gentlemen. Keep up the good work.
Mark K
2021-01-08 15:43:28 +0000 UTCMaybe add to that the book “Let Them Eat Tweets” by Jacob Hacker (I have not read it but have heard him interviewed)
Mark K
2021-01-08 15:41:32 +0000 UTCWhen it was mentioned there are those who constantly triangulate just to ensure they are never in agreement with liberals I couldn’t help but think of Glenn Greenwald.
John
2021-01-08 09:25:01 +0000 UTCseeing others’ comments and adding that the conversation about fascist I think would be helpful currently should be about ideology while historicizing the conditions fascist ideologies emerged under and comparing to other ideologies of the right. I don’t think the comparison of Trump to fascist dictators of the past is particularly helpful on its own, but rather that the conversation about fascism (and perhaps other far right, anti-liberal projects) and how their ideologies relate and are being or are not being deployed currently
Samuel Kessler
2021-01-07 17:19:56 +0000 UTCThanks for this. As always, I appreciate your insights. By far, though, the part of the discussion I am most interested to hear discussed further concerns Leftist thinking of people like Corey Robin and Alex Gourevitich, whose arguments always come back to Trump not being a powerful president -- and actually the least powerful president. I have long thought that while they add some important insights to the discussion, they underestimate the insidiousness of Trumpism and the passions (and funds) it incites.I can't help feeling that they dangerously overstate their position in order to take aim at the targets that inflame them the most: centrists and liberals.
TheRick
2021-01-07 16:44:32 +0000 UTCMaybe Trump is better described as a caudillo from the US.
Chad Bailey
2021-01-07 16:08:57 +0000 UTCI think of Trump as more akin to the royalist and Carlist parties of Europe, or even Nicholas II of Russia, who saw his own link to the people as superseding any democracy. Even better, a Jackson or another American demagogue. Leftists in the US need to stop fitting the rightists of today into the same old WW2 boxes, particularly using European continental philosophies and parties. The Americas themselves have political histories that are often overlooked in favor of European ideas.
Chad Bailey
2021-01-07 16:07:37 +0000 UTCInsightful as always. But deliberating whether or not Trump is a fascist seems somewhat misdirected. The movement he seems most clearly to align with is global kleptocracy, which lies beneath several political veneers across the globe from Kazakhstan to sub-Saharan Africa. Movements aided and abetted by a global banking system more than happy to look the other way. Trump has long served as a detergent for the sluices of stolen public assets privatized into real estate holdings in New York and Florida that nurture such thievery. I think the alignment of contemporary American conservatism with ongoing global kleptocratic initiatives that have accelerated since the collapse of the Soviet Union would be a great topic for you to cover. I’d recommend the book “Kleptopia” as a great starting point for your research.
Randy Weinstein
2021-01-07 15:35:23 +0000 UTCI think the fascism question would be interesting to hear more about from you. Not just the in the immediate sense of what Trump and Trumpism’s relation to fascism, but the overall relation between conservatism and fascism. I’ve struggled myself with the differentiation from “far-right” and “fascist” and have largely settled on the differentiation being that fascism seeks to overturn and move past liberalism. So essentially, a properly counter-revolutionary and revanchist yet still revolutionary sentiment, the right’s project that runs parallel to communism’s attempt to oust liberalism. But then we have the post-liberals! Clearly, the differentiation is more complicated than my simplified distinction and must be better historicized, so I’d love to hear more exploration of this relationship, especially in these times of seeming crises of liberalism.
Samuel Kessler
2021-01-07 14:23:28 +0000 UTCAlso, we need to be careful about using this to make the capitol less accessible to the public. The response to this could be both liberal and authoritarian, a la Bonapartism.
Chad Bailey
2021-01-07 13:31:13 +0000 UTCA question that I’m sure will get answered in the next few days: were there any police officers, active duty military personnel, reservists, or off duty national guards in the capitol yesterday? What happens if so? The 3%ers do recruit from those groups.
Chad Bailey
2021-01-07 13:03:34 +0000 UTCI hesitate to call this a coup because I don’t think that any of this is thought through in any way. It is just pure id.
erik w bjorke
2021-01-07 13:00:27 +0000 UTCSerious question. Was this just a failed palace coup? Did Trump think the rest of the country would go into revolt to support his action and take a bunch of state houses and governors’ mansions? Or that loyalist members of the military would step forward to support him? I don’t think I can tell if this is just crappy Trump planning or a mistake on his part.
Chad Bailey
2021-01-07 12:18:47 +0000 UTCPerfect. Hope it was helpful.
Know Your Enemy
2021-01-07 08:00:05 +0000 UTCLoved this!
Luke Mayville
2021-01-07 07:59:52 +0000 UTCOr, more thoroughly: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/12/18/live/
JimJim5122
2021-01-07 07:21:09 +0000 UTCI dig the episode, but the closing quote is misattributed: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_times
JimJim5122
2021-01-07 07:18:59 +0000 UTCMan I had just sat down with a glass of rye about 5 mins before this dropped and thought "I could really use an episode to digest today". Y'all are heroes.
Jackson W
2021-01-07 05:19:17 +0000 UTC
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