On the one hand world history is an endless chronicle of growth, war and conquest, technological achievement and empire, a multi millennia long conspiracy of the rich against the poor, the strong preying on the weak. But it is also, simultaneously, if much less documented, many big and small resistances to tyranny, enslavement, and whatever rat race traps rule the day, resistance and especially the cooperation to endure and escape various forms of violent domination.
You might call the former, in terms of historiography, the stories we tell about history, the conservative materialist, empirical (always counting the money), Winners theory of history, with its preoccupation with the preservation of already-existing wealth accumulation and associated social advantages and the real and perceived threats to those advantages, and the latter resistance, a liberating Loser's theory of history, the secret history of the "Woke ideology" of whatever day, promising uplift, expanding civil rights, more community, more freedom and equality, rooted historically in the modern period in the American and French Revolutions at the end of the 18th century but also, both theories really, present in every Chinese peasant revolt and Protestant Reformation or any large human migration going back to Mesopotamia and Egypt (3500 BCE), at least.
Perhaps to the former we owe winning wars and military domination or empire. But to the latter, to which I am particularly partial as a working stiff, we owe our right to vote and our living wages, such as they are, what human rights protections we do enjoy, and the freakin' weekend, which I'm pretty sure is universally popular. Resistance is Sisyphean, endlessly contested and compromising, and no stupid dictatorship or AI automation will end this essentially negotiated and fought over perpetual feature of human societies.
Anyway, two historical takes on the Grump Era published last year that I've found perhaps weirdly unsettling and comfortin. Both include big picture perspectives and comparisons that resonate with today's political crisis. They've helped me and I thought might you too.
Takeover: Hitler's Final Rise To Power, by Timothy W. Ryback (2024): What rhymes? The way the business people don't really like Hitler but prefer him to the socialists and communists and think, with no little conceit, they can manage him. Also, Hitler's delusions of grandeur ring with Grump's; even if their class origins are very different: Hitler a patriot veteran and Grump the playboy business tycoon. Hitler's supremely confident with winning 37% of the popular vote because he reasons 37% is 75% of a simple majority; this kind of strategic delusional thinking seems Trumpian somehow. All of Hitler's people, Goebbels, Goring, Himmler, etc, by contrast, harbor constant fears the party is on the verge of collapse. By Hitler's logic Grump really did win a huge mandate, although he didn't even win a majority of the popular vote, beating Harris by only 1.5%, and recent reporting indicates he was the beneficiary of a bunch of voter suppression, which the red states and districts have been working diligently at since 2021. Also, the Night of the Long Knives of 1934 casts an ominous shadow over the present Blitzkrieg of illiberalism, to say the least.
When The Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, by John Ganz (2024): All the original founders of the social conservative elite panic known as the Contract with America are here. It's 1993. It's the same old song, really. From the Powell Memorandum of 1971 all the way to the "Flight 93 Election" theory of 2016, where have we heard this before: The Democrats have to be stopped, they're destroying the country, if they aren't stopped the country will be lost forever to socialist health care and sex scandals or whatever X bigot issue is riling up the illiberal mob in whatever given election. Much of it fueled by a slow burning desperation about demographic changes white supremacists can't stop, hence the desperation part. Actually, the "mixed" population on the census, which, mind you, is 70-80% white mixed with some other race/ethnicity category and is likely to remain a super-majority for the rest of the century, isn't supposed to surpass whites-only until 2044, but Maga are already wetting their pants and more people will be hurt because they feel like they're losing their country because the kid taking their order at the Burger King drive-thru speaks English with a difficult to follow accent. Ganz explores in molecular detail the conservative ferment triggered by these changes and the waning potential of the so-called Reagan Revolution in the 1992 election. Talk about fever swamps, like with Rick Perlstein I'm both awed and a little frightened by the insider baseball depths Ganz gets into rightwing spaces I have to heavily filter. But I'm also grateful, he's a very able guide, historically searching, tremendous attention to the details of the historical record, and a sly sense of humor. I still think culturally the best way to understand Grump is as a Frankenstein creation of the neoliberal yuppie greed-is-good '80s, the decade before Ganz's focus, but my Grump is a monster without a constituency or cult. What Ganz is really getting into here is the making of Grump's base and cult. And what a story it is! More clown show charlatans than you can shake a stick at: Ross Perot, Patrick Buchanan, Ruby Ridge (the event, not any one person), and all the rest.
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