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Dec 21, 2022Liked by John Ganz

"This material may be protected by copyright"? ;-) Is this a way of saying that Trumpism is a reworking of old intellectual property?

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My only quibble here is with the notion that the struggle between the representatives and the represented bursts onto the scene with the Tea Parties. This is something I have been grappling with in my own mind for quite some time—trying to understand how we could possibly have arrived at a situation where something very much resembling fascism (regardless of what one chooses to call it) once again threatened our democratic norms (however frayed). It is safe to say that I see the situation as "overdetermined," though I readily admit that's a bit of a cop out.

Clearly the Republican party changed its rhetoric in the 1990s, no doubt over a despondency that Reagan was gone and much of the state apparatus remained more or less intact. Think of Pat Buchanan's campaign for president and Newt Gingrich's aggressive reinvention of the House GOP. But let's go back to Reagan himself and the desire to shrink the government to a size where it could be strangled to death.

But I find myself going even further back, to Lewis Powell's famous memo of 1970. Already at that point—even before the oil crisis and the mid-70s inflation—elements of capital were eager to launch a kind of counter-revolution. I'm not suggesting that those elements should be regarded as fascist. Buchanan perhaps, maybe even Gingrich. But Powell and the Reaganites were standard issue reactionaries interested in redistributing wealth upward. My point is only that these all prepared the ground for the Tea Parties, so that when the crisis came the ideology and the rhetoric were already in wide circulation on the right. (I'm leaving out the obviously important role played by talk radio, mainly Rush Limbaugh, and then Fox News).

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