Stop, Look, and Listen #20
A round-up of what I have been reading and listening to this past week.
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This post is part of the newsletter’s ‘Stop, Look, and Listen’ series, a digest of articles and podcasts that I’ve found engaging and insightful over the past week.
Content warning: Antisemitism; Anti-Blackness.
The 1896 US presidential election
I thoroughly enjoyed this instalment of the Past Present Future podcast’s series on American presidential elections, with David Runciman and Gary Gerstle, on 1896, when Republican William McKinley defeated William Jennings Bryan, who stood on a joint Democrat and Populist ticket. Runciman and Gerstle discussed Bryan’s insurgent outsider appeal, based on his rejection of the deflationary gold standard that had badly hit new rural smallholders, and evangelical, moralising oratory that appealed to their religious beliefs.
The Populists held East Coast financial interests, working in cahoots with City of London, responsible for farmers’ problems. Bryan was however unable to win over urban workers, also badly hit by the economic depression and involved in industrial unrest. Instead, the McKinley campaign piloted modern electoral techniques (such as state-based and microtargeting campaigns, and amassing of donations from frightened industrialists), while his protectionist policies on tariffs promised to protect urban working class jobs.
As Runciman and Gerstle highlighted, Bryan’s defeat resulted from Republican dominance in urban coastal states, but he remained an influential figure into the twentieth century, partly through an appeal to anti-imperialists and, to a degree, nativists. They also emphasised how, while the 1896 election sounded the death knell for the Populists as a national electoral force, many of their policy ambitions came to be implemented during the 1900s and 1910s through Progressivism, and later from the 1930s in the New Deal.
The American right in its global context
On the Know Your Enemy podcast, Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bellwelcomed Jacob Heilbrunn as their guest to talk about his new book, America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators. They explored how American right-wing intellectuals were frequently infatuated by and projected their hopes onto foreign dictatorial leaders such as Kaiser Wilhelm II, Benito Mussolini, and Francisco Franco, couching this admiration in a superficial embrace of other national cultures.
Subsequently, their discussion turned to how, following the New Deal and the Second World War, foreign policy and the Cold War provided both a unifying issue for conservatives to rally around and a stick to beat liberals with electorally, and how this was often accompanied by apologia for antidemocratic systems and forces aligned with the West, from Apartheid in South Africa to the Contras in Nicaragua. Finally, Sitman and Adler-Bell reflected with Heilbrunn on how the end of the Cold War fractured this conservative coalition, and the neoconservatives’ authority was fatally undermined by the Iraq War; and on why the resurgent American paleoconservative movement now identifies so strongly with Viktor Orbán and Hungary.
Seth Cotlar’s work on Walter Huss and the Oregon Republican Party offers a microcosm of the way in which these shifting international conditions and radical right-wing intellectual currents have played out in the US over time. In this post for his Rightlandianewsletter, he explains how Huss’s politics were shaped by the American version of fascism that found some support among the Portlandian working class prior to the Second World War. Huss continued to interpret communism as Jewish plot and to dabble in Holocaust denial, and did not always successfully conceal these aspects of his worldview in the post-war era, when they were considered beyond the pale.
Yet as Cotlar noted, while Huss’s politics may have potentially attracted the attention of the FBI, the more moderate Republicans who dominated the party in Oregon saw him as a ‘kook’ but were reluctant to overtly call out fascism when they saw it. Though Huss never had significant broad electoral appeal himself, he was able to mobilise support within the state party, culminating in his election as its chairman 1978. Cotlar argued that this connection between the worlds of fringe-right and electoral politics helps to explain not only this outcome, but also the Trumpian takeover of the Republicans on a national level.
Imagining the end of the world
In this post for her Bad Theology in the Good Place newsletter, Melissa Florer-Bixler examined the paradox of Republican willingness to attack abortion as destroying human life, beginning at the embryonic stage, but not in vitro fertilisation (IVF), which also involves biological engineering and the destruction of embryos. She noted that this discrepancy owes partly to the fact that whereas abortion services are more likely to be used by poorer people of colour, wealthier white people are more frequent users of IVF.
Yet as Florer-Bixler also emphasised, Republican hostility to abortion is also reflective of the politics of ‘The Child’ as an imagined inhabitant of a better future world, whereby the possibility of radical transformation in the present is rejected, and the sanctity of human life is not extended to actual living children. She argued that there is an element of this in apparently progressive politics too, which imagine that the environmentally unsustainable practices of present can be sustained through incremental changes. Florer-Bixler instead advocated practices of degrowth, rooted in anticolonial and Afrofuturist conceptions of the future, and for an ecologically conscious Christian theology that sees no future in the present as is, and can therefore envision radical changes instead.
The end of the world was also the topic of this episode of the Peoples and Things podcast series, which part of the New Books Network. Host Lee Vinsel interviewed Zachary Loeb about his research into pessimistic intellectual currents that deviate drastically from techtopian visions on issues such as climate change and artifical intelligence, and which are often banded together as ‘doomerism’ in a way that falsely equivocates between more insightful and paranoid analyses.
They also discussed Loeb’s doctoral thesis and the ‘Millennium Bug’ and the technical, official, and popular responses that this threat evoked in 1990s America. Loeb argued that while awareness of the issue among computing experts was evident as far back as the 1970s, the US government paid far greater attention to addressing the accompanying risks in the mid-1990s, and in the process had to come to terms with the country’s increasing dependence on computer technology and what it would mean if that were to fail. He contrasted this with the media’s more hyperbolic discovery of the topic in the late 1990s, by which point official strategy was pretty well developed, as well as grassroots responses that ranged from conspiratorial millenarianism to communal-minded preparedness and activism.
American Fiction
I wanted to conclude with Eskor David Johnson’s piece for the Los Angeles Review of Books on American Fiction, and what it tells us about the position of Black artists in relation to the market. I wrote up my own analysis of the film for the newsletter last month:
Johnson noted how Black artists must negotiate white gatekeepers within the publishing and film industries, and their expectations as to what a Black book or film should look like, and that this predetermines success through the levels of resources subsequently invested in those works. In this context, he argued, it is ultimately unknowable what Black artists would produce if not for these constraints, and that even satires like American Fiction, which inverts stereotypes with its rounded Black characters and two-dimension white stereotypical ones, are still bound by a paradigm of having to point out this racism.
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Anything good to report politically? I rarely here any good news in the political realm.