July 2020

ABOLISH THE CONDITIONS:
An interview with
CEDRIC JOHNSON

The political science professor and author of Revolutionaries to Race Leaders spoke with us about the recent protests against police brutality and the need to center a materialist analysis of black political life.

//mark jay

Cedric Johnson is professor of Black Studies and Political Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the author of Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics and a forthcoming book that analyzes carceral power and anti-policing struggles from a Marxist perspective. A prominent theorist of the US Left, Johnson has long been wary of "race-centric approaches to thinking about inequality," and has called on scholars and activists to overcome their "hesitation to engage in class analysis of black life." For Johnson, the only meaningful way to overcome problems of oppression, exploitation, dispossession, and inequality is to build towards a society "where there are no disposable people and where the right to health care, education, housing, and to one’s creative capacity and time are not determined and circumscribed by compulsory wage labor."

On June 29th, Mark Jay talked with Cedric Johnson about the political implications of the recent Black Lives Matter protests, as well as his thoughts on topics such as fascism, the abolitionist movement, the racial dynamics of the US Left, and the role that academics and artists can play in social struggles.

Q: Since the outbreak of Black Lives Matter protests in late May, a growing number of activists have taken up the demand to defund and even abolish the police. In the recent past, you've been somewhat critical of the abolitionist movement. Although you sympathize with many of the abolitionists' sentiments, you've suggested that abolition may be too out of step with public opinion for it to be a viable organizing principle. You've pointed out that as the Black Lives Matter movement has emerged, "over the last five years, satisfaction with police has strengthened among all ethnic and racial groups, including African Americans (from 50% “at least somewhat satisfied” in 2015 to 72% now)." Is that the basis of your critique: that you feel that abolitionists aren't in touch with most people in the US?

A: For me, the conundrum goes even deeper than the problem of public opinion because you can always argue that public opinion is malleable. Public attitudes are temperamental and shift according to historical events, new information, and so forth. But that said, there is a real contradiction. On the one hand, most Americans now oppose racist actions or maybe even more specifically, the killings of black civilians. People are clearly outraged about that, as they should be. But, on the other hand, when you look at public opinion over time, and even now, most Americans are not in favor of drastically cutting police budgets, even if that's changing in a few places, such as Minneapolis, where the city council is now in favor of dismantling and replacing the police department with something else. They're going to take a year to hear public input before finalizing some alternative strategies for achieving public safety.

There are some bigger problems, even though I agree with their sentiments, and have learned a lot from abolitionist thinkers and activism. The first problem is that mass incarceration is basically a cheap solution to the welfare state. John Clegg and Adaner Usmani make this argument in a recent piece for Catalyst. The police are really a way to manage the poor without generous social spending and doing the things we have done in the past in terms of jobs and public assistance. If you throw out the police, we need to deal with the underlying problem, the fundamental inequality. I know there are some advocates of abolition who agree with that position, but there’s still a problem of emphasis and scale, so while rolling back the carceral apparatus is necessary, a much larger redistributive project is imperative if we are to truly address the social basis of mass incarceration. We need an abolitionism of a different sort.

Connected to that, there's also the problem of real crime. Part of the prison buildup was driven by imagined crime threats to white publics, but some of it was also pushed by real concerns about crime from working-class black and brown publics. That is something we have to think about, especially in this moment, when police who don't like the way they're being represented are acting out and engaging in all sorts of quiet riots and sick-outs that have real consequences for crime-stricken neighborhoods and communities. Now that it’s summer and we're relaxing the stay-at-home restrictions, some cities have seen spikes in violent crime. This is real, and many of the victims of these crimes are African American and Latino. In the last few weeks here in Chicago we've seen a wave of homicides and shootings, with some children and teenagers being killed.

Q: That's interesting you bring that up. I remember reading an article about mass incarceration by Heather Ann Thompson, who is such a big-name scholar. Her argument is that the kinds of law-and-order policies that emerged in places like Detroit were responses to what was essentially an invented, fictitious crime wave. But for me, that doesn't seem to hold up for the '60s and '70s, and it certainly isn't the case more recently. When I was living in Detroit, seeing what was happening with people in the poorest neighborhoods on the east and west sides, crime was clearly a huge issue. Meanwhile, outside of downtown and a couple of rich neighborhoods, emergency response times in Detroit are horrendous, often over an hour, and so this problem of police neglect seems to be just as important as the problem of too much policing. I remember people at Colony Arms, a public housing unit where they launched a couple of military raids a few years ago, people were talking about how aside from these kind of spectacles, the police were basically afraid to show up to their building. So the SWAT raids were actually more of PR stunts for the government to cover up the fact that they basically neglect these areas most of the time. And then a lot of intellectuals interpret this by saying like, wow, look at these SWAT raids, there is far too much policing — whereas the day-to-day condition is extreme poverty mixed with easy access to guns, no access to jobs and basically not enough real policing. Sure, they'll be quick to harass a homeless person downtown, but they'll be slow to respond to an emergency call on the west side.

A: Right. These are real problems. Of course, police are not the solution. In my latest book, my argument is that we have to abolish the conditions that police are charged with managing. We have to focus on how to deal with the problem of inequality and the solution in my mind is that we achieve public safety through broad economic security. We must do away with the hardships too many people endure, which often leads to survival crimes, or criminalized forms of work, and justifies the kind of policing we're using right now to control the poor and protect property regimes. Inasmuch as abolitionists are engaged in questions of how to achieve public safety through economic security, I'm all in favor of that.

Some of the defunding demands push us in the direction of thinking about redistributional politics, but really, they don’t go far enough. There is the much deeper problem of wealth inequality and state neglect that isn’t fully accounted for in this demand to defund the police. People have said this before. I think David Harvey got into trouble for saying this about the Ferguson protests, essentially saying he didn’t really see much anti-capitalism there. He was right, but that conclusion didn’t square well with the prevailing racial liberal ways of thinking about the policing problem and potential solutions. The problem of black people being unjustly targeted is one visible dimension of the carceral regime, but it’s an expansive police power put in place on behalf of millions of Americans of all different backgrounds who benefit from the market economy policing helps to reproduce — that is, the processes of real estate valuation and development, and the maintenance of downtown commercial corridors and tourism districts millions enjoy at the expense of the banished and regulated poor. The way that policing has always been implicated in the reproduction of property regimes and the protection of certain class interests gets lost in conversations that reduce the police problem to one of racism. If we are serious about ending the problem, we need to focus on what exactly policing is for. It is not just to control black bodies, which is the popular way of thinking about it. When we look beyond the urban theater where Black Lives Matter demonstrations have unfolded, policing exists to control the dispossessed, the criminalized, and the impoverished, even if the ethnic and racial demography changes.

The prison expansion and the turn to militaristic hyper-policing are not motivated principally by racism. Whether in Chicago’s North Lawndale neighborhood or the Ozark country of southern Missouri, the process of policing the poor is orchestrated by the same diverse cast of beat cops, case managers, probation officers, district attorneys, public defenders, prison guards and wardens, social reformers, conservative and liberal politicians, weapons manufacturers, lobbyists, nonprofits, and foundations: a kind of social control complex that has been growing by leaps and bounds as poverty, cynicism, and the surplus population increase and the neoliberal era grinds on. — "The Panthers Can't Save Us Now," Spring 2017.

We also need to consider the broad geography of contemporary policing. We live in a large country, and one with many different regions, qualitatively different kinds of cities, different local demographics and concerns. Therefore, we need to move forward on this in a way that takes people’s grounded concerns about safety and security seriously, concerns which can’t be dismissed as imagined or as anti-black racism, or reduced to investor class interests. I had a conversation with people about this locally, and there's a substantial divide. On the one hand, there are demands to cut ties between the Chicago Police Department and the public schools, but that proposal lost in the recent vote. There are also demands to defund the police here in Chicago. But those are not coming necessarily from the working-class communities on the south and west sides where people have been dealing with a chaotic situation since the George Floyd protests. The riots and looting that erupted first in the Loop before radiating out into the neighborhoods and the suburbs have been disastrous for many Chicagoans. One colleague of mine was the victim of a home invasion. Another friend had guns drawn on her as she and other residents tried to dissuade looters from taking one neighborhood store. There are many stories like this. A 22-year-old man was killed in an Olive Garden parking lot not far from where I live in the midst of the looting at a nearby shopping mall. Over the course of that weekend of rioting and looting, 24 people were killed here in Chicago.

The final problem with the abolitionist position worth noting here is more philosophical: Can we really take force out of politics? Can we do away with a policing function, especially if we hope to reproduce a more just order than our current state? These concerns may seem far afield, but we should think about the place of state force and police power in other kinds of progressive-to-radical left regimes historically, not just our capitalist social order. If you have a situation where you have created a society that is just, a society that consecrates popular and working class interests in its core governing institutions, you will have to protect it from its opponents, saboteurs, and enemies. If you think about the context of post-revolutionary Cuba for example, the Castro regime was able to survive because of its police and military, through a period when many other socialist governments born after the Second World War in different parts of the Third World did not. Those socialist experiments were militarily defeated by capitalist powers, often destroyed from the inside by way of coups d’état, assassinations, and agent provocateurs. So I think there's a naiveté among those who believe we could completely do away with force as a part of social order and political life. I think that as socialists, and people on the left more broadly, we should think about these questions of whether we could completely do away with force and coercion.

I’m not suggesting that people who are prison abolitionists or Black Lives Matter activists are not thinking about these broader political and philosophical questions. I know they are because I engage in these debates with some of them. Still, our politics have to be grounded in a keen understanding of real historical conditions if people beyond our left activist circles are to take these ideas seriously. If we fail to do that, whatever political strategies and solutions we try to advance will not resonate with people who live in neighborhoods where crime is a constant. We have to deal with these grim realities, the fact of real crime, poverty, and segregation. For years now, the Right has dominated discussions of these social realities, often using the fact of these conditions to blame the poor for their poverty and justify hyperpolicing of the same populations. I think it is possible and necessary for the Left to condemn the underclass blame-labeling of the poor, and at the same time, take seriously the conditions endured by the most vulnerable Americans.

As a rallying cry, Black Lives Matter opened up public space for disparate campaigns, networks of grieving families, criminal justice reform organizations, and localized struggles against the carceral state that had been in motion for decades. At the same time, however, like most great slogans, #BlackLivesMatter advanced a rather straightforward, if not simplistic analysis of the issue at hand, that the problems of policing were primarily racial. Black Lives Matter fervor also unleashed a torrent of historical misinformation, conspiracy theory, and wrong-headed thinking about politics. In elevating a race-centric interpretation of American life and history, Black Lives Matter has actually had the effect of making it more difficult to think critically and honestly about black life as it exists, in all of its complexity and contradictions. Rather than clearing a path through the thickets, some left intellectuals have made peace with this overgrowth of bad historical thinking, even though it threatens to choke out the possibility for cultivating the kind of critical left analyses of society we so desperately need. — "Who’s Afraid of Left Populism?" Winter 2019.

Q: In a piece published on Nonsite on June 9th of this year, you wrote that, "This moment has been a triumph for Black Lives Matter activists, but once the plumes of tear gas dissipate and compassion fatigue sets in, the real beneficiaries will likely be the neoliberal Democrats and the capitalist blocs they serve." You have also warned in various places the most likely result of the protests will be "technocratic solutions" to police departments around the US. Can you give an idea of what you mean by this? And also, can you describe what it would look like to have a political movement capable of producing the substantive changes you are calling for?

A: Let me start with what we should be fighting for first, and then what we can expect to see if we don't. For many on the left, the Sanders campaign reminded us that it was possible to push for a public-goods-oriented politics. You can call it social democracy, you can call it democratic socialism, but the campaign advanced a left-pragmatic politics that had traction precisely because it spoke to people's needs in the wake of neoliberalization, which has hollowed out the social wage. The campaign showed that many Americans actually yearn for public goods. They want single-payer health care. They actually want to be able to pursue higher education without being debt burdened. I think while the Sanders campaigns weren't successful electorally, they reminded us that that kind of politics was still possible, that the word socialism didn’t really have the same stigma it had during the late Cold War period, or even at the start of this century. I mean, we couldn’t really use that word in the circles where I grew up. None of the black southerners I knew coming up used that word. That entire notion had been banished from the realm of legitimate political conversation; to talk about socialism and communism was a very quick way to be ostracized.

Even when I left the South and went into graduate school, most people I encountered in school, at work, and my social circles weren't really on board with socialism. Many people connected to older left organizations and publications embraced it, and even then some often used euphemisms like “progressivism,” “progressive Left,” or “anti-corporate Left,” as placeholders through the late ‘90s. It is interesting to see graduate students now who are writing Marxist dissertations in various fields. That was not a possibility when I was in graduate school. Anyone who tried that got a lot of pushback from faculty back in the ‘90s. So, in short, things have changed. The worsening conditions of neoliberalization and capitalist globalization have made Marxist analysis more legible and relevant for audiences who wouldn’t have been receptive before. In terms of leftist organization and ideological orientation, we are in a better place than we were back then. There's the potential to build. I think we should ground our conversations in the actual conditions most people endure, and our activities in the kinds of fights we might actually win in the foreseeable future.

That means not necessarily approaching other Americans with doctrinaire positions, but rather thinking through the best possible solutions we can bring to bear in the context that we've been given. For instance, in many cities, people are demanding the reinstitution of rent controls, people are developing different strategies for de-commodifying housing, others are calling for public jobs programs, people are demanding free access to public transit, and all sorts of things which are not socialism in the fuller sense, but these are fights that we can win and they're wins that might actually alter the ways people think about what's possible in this society. That's what I think we should be pushing for: to de-commodify various kinds of goods and services that we need, and we should also be fighting on the labor front.

I mean, this is also one of the odd things about the last couple of months: We saw growing labor rebellions in certain sectors, the so-called essential workers, and among workers in the gig economy who have been trying to organize for some time. All of a sudden, given the conditions of the pandemic, their jobs, low wages, and precarious conditions were front and center, and many people were sympathetic, largely because we could all see how important these workers were to our day-to-day existence. That shelter-in-place context created the space and leverage for these workers to initiate petitions, wildcat strikes, walk-outs, and sick-outs in warehouses, distribution plants, and other workplaces across the country. I'm anxious to see how this is going to unfold going forward because we're likely to have more shelter-in-place time in the coming months. Will millions of Americans support these essential workers at the same scale and intensity we’ve seen for anti-racist protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder? Will we see the convergence of these forces?

What's at stake here? What's really at stake? What do ruling elites in this country want? Because that's the other thing. Right now, we're hearing what some Black Lives Matter activists want, because they're on Twitter and everywhere else saying it. But we know that there's the Chamber of Commerce, Business Alliance types in every city who are sitting down with mayors. They're not going to talk about it. They're not going to have a press conference. But they're sitting down, saying, “How are you going to guarantee us that the downtown tourist zone remains viable, that we'll be able to have visitors? How are we going to make sure that more middle-class and wealthy residents continue to move into our cities?” And for them, policing is a fundamental dimension of that. They're not talking about dissolving the police. They want to get away from a public relations morass, they don't want deal with that sort of trash. But they're definitely still thinking in terms of how do to help the system perpetuate itself. We have to be aware of that. That was part of a reason for writing a piece about the response of the Congressional Democrats and all of these major corporations, because they're totally on board with a version of anti-racism that will allow them to continue on this path of perpetual compound growth and profit making. That's totally what they're on board with. And I think we have to be equally serious. Not only analyzing and understanding what they're up to, but also fighting against some of the posturing, some of the utopianism, and some of the lack of practical thinking about politics in our own midst. — "Policing Beyond the Technical Fix," June 2020.

On the technological front for policing, there are a number of developments that have been in the works for some time, technocratic solutions to problems that police departments are facing. Most police chiefs don't want these public relations fallouts. The bad public perception of police officers is something that they don't want; they want to restore confidence. But if we don't necessarily push for abolition of the economic conditions that police are managing, that is, the conditions of the poor, the dispossessed, the unemployed — if we don't deal with that, we'll end up with a barrage of various technocratic solutions. This will accomplish a few things: These technocratic fixes will make policing more efficient, they'll take some of the human error and human culpability out of the carceral regime, and they'll also set up a situation where many people will be able to stomach what is happening because the more rational and efficient process may not be perceived as so blatantly racist.

Let me give you a couple of quick examples. Back in 2016, during the week Philando Castile and Alton Sterling were killed, we caught a glimpse of one possible future. During that same week there were also two separate mass shootings of police. Acting alone, black gunmen Micah Xavier Johnson and Gavin Eugene Long killed police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, respectively. What police did in the Dallas stand-off with Johnson is something we should all take seriously as a portent. The Dallas police took a robot typically used to defuse bombs, equipped it with C-4 explosives, and delivered the payload close enough to Micah Xavier Johnson to kill him. That was the first time in American history that law enforcement had used a robot in that way during a police standoff. Since then, however, other states have moved towards more extensive use of robotics and drones. During the Dakota Access Pipeline fight, North Dakota actually approved the use of weaponized drones by law enforcement, becoming the first state to do so. Massachusetts legislators have debated a similar bill, and the state police there also piloted the use of a robotic dog for the purpose of bomb detonation.

Those technological solutions, which take police out of harm’s way, are already in the works. Whenever I talk about police use of robots and drones with people who came up in the '80s, they usual chuckle and make some reference to the cult classic film RoboCop, but that's a little extreme and distracts from the real technological adoptions already in motion. All of the robotics that are used now in industry, medical procedures, and even households are pretty innocuous. For instance, the robotic vacuum doesn't scare people, and that type of technology is now part of the cultural order. I think we could see similar applications with respect to robotics in policing. And maybe even more likely than these examples, which are still mostly experimental, a more far-reaching technological change is what we already see happening with respect to policing and data-mining. So-called intelligence-led policing or big-data policing is already being used by police departments to aggregate data from all sorts of different sources, assist investigations, determine suspect lists and move their work forward in ways that are more efficient, saving time and labor. Within this mobilization of information, we can expect to see more prevalent use of facial-recognition software as well as networked surveillance cameras; all of this is already happening in various stages of implementation.

Another example, which you have talked about, is home-monitoring and the use of house arrest instead of incarceration. That is almost certain to become more widespread in the next couple of years in some states, mainly because it is a remedy that has support from a wide variety of interests, both ex-offender advocates and law enforcement alike. Here in Chicago we have the Cook County sheriff Tom Dart. Listen to him talk — he sounds like a prison reform advocate. On multiple occasions, he’s described the Cook County Jail as the largest mental health facility in the state. He has also called for an end to money bail. With the wave of mass protests in June, in the coming months and years, we should expect to see the elimination of money bail in more states, as well as the increased use of house arrest for nonviolent offenders, and even for some violent offenders.

I think many of these technical fixes to the broad problems of policing and mass incarceration are in fact an improvement over the current state of affairs, but none confront the fundamental problem of a deeply unequal society. There are millions of Americans who have to survive or subsist on criminalized forms of work or through piecemeal, part-time work and gig-economy work. We need to deal with those problems of inequality rather than simply finding a cheap way to curb carceral excesses.

Q: In your 2017 article "The Panthers Can't Save Us Now" you argued that nostalgia for the imagery and rhetoric of the Black Panther Party in recent protests around police violence obscures the fact that political conditions have changed in the intervening years, and that such nostalgia has led to a sort of repetition of policies and tactics that were already tried in the 1970s and 1980s. The connection between the past and the present of racial oppression is continually evoked in the current moment. For example, in Ava Duvernay's hugely popular film 13th, the director draws a direct line from slavery to mass incarceration. Her argument is that the thirteenth amendment barred human bondage except in the case of criminals, leading to a mythology of black criminality which since the end of the Civil War has facilitated the continued bondage of black people. The persistence of racial disparities has made such thinking prevalent for decades. A recent New Yorker article quoted from the 1951 "We Charge Genocide" petition delivered by black activists at the UN, which includes the line: "Once the classic method of lynching was the rope. Now it is the policeman’s bullet." What are the risks to drawing such direct historical continuities, and how do you account for the prevalence of these kinds of analyses?

A: One thing that gets lost in this mode of thinking are the meaningful changes that have occurred since Jim Crow. If you think about the 1960s and the major Civil Rights Acts as well as the programs of the Great Society, and then the subsequent election of a few generations of black politicians in cities — what you see since then is significant progress in many areas, a reality that is lost in much contemporary discourse, because now the fashionable tendency is to flatten history and to say that nothing has changed. This is the Black Lives Matter zeitgeist. The prevailing anti-racist way of thinking about history leads to some misunderstandings. We know that the Civil Rights Acts and black political incorporation mattered in real terms because poverty was greatly reduced by those historical changes. Many people forget that. We went from the majority of black people living in poverty in the 1950s down to about a quarter now, and that's significant. It is still a problem, black people are still disproportionately poor, but there's still been substantial progress.

As for why these kinds of flat historical narratives flourish, I think there are a couple of reasons. Let me start with an explanation of why I think Black Lives Matter becomes so powerful as a kind of popular anti-racism, and why it’s so widely embraced in particular by black people across different class positions.

My way of thinking about it is that the entire US population has experienced the process of neoliberalization, the decimation of the public sector, the weakening of labor protections and decline of unions, the rollback of the social safety net. And what this has meant for black populations, even segments of the black middle-class, has been especially intense and disastrous. Take public housing for example: we had over 100,000 public housing units in the US that were destroyed as a part of Hope VI legislation. And black people are really being battered around by these revanchist changes.

So within the growing context of neoliberal precarity, even if you're a black person who's poised to get a law degree and possibly work for a firm, you're disadvantaged now that some of the anti-discrimination policies that were in place have now either been weakened in your state or been compromised in such a way that limits your possibilities. In the immediate decades following major civil rights legislation, we also witnessed the expansion of black homeownership in many cities, but many of those owners saw the bottom fall out of their neighborhoods as a result of the subprime mortgage crisis. So you've got working poor blacks who lost homes as a result of Hope VI, but then you also have middle class blacks who have finally gotten a leg up who lost their homes, or remained saddled with student loan debt because of the disappearance of the kinds of grants and other programs that might have helped to finance an education without debt.

These and other situated class-experiences of neoliberalization together created fertile ground for Black Lives Matter ideas to flourish. Ben Crump, the lawyer who's taken on a lot of cases on behalf of those killed by the police, refers to black people being under siege in his recent book. And that is the experiential perspective many have, because if you've lived in different black neighborhoods and communities as I have over the years, you've witnessed precipitous decline and hardship, and it's easy to accept a narrative that this is a backlash against whatever gains were made by black people in the '60s and '70s.

Sadly, there are all sorts of academics who support that popular narrative, even though the sociology is more complex. I think there are a few reasons for that. I think some academics are ideologically committed, but I think there are also professional and commercial incentives to think and write about race and racism in a liberal fashion. Certain publishing venues really only publish analyses that deal with inequality through a racial lens. And so if that's the interpretation you’re committed to, you'll get access, you'll be able to publish these arguments. And so, I think it's a combination of ideological commitment and also the ways in which presses, major left magazines, university departments, and grant-making institutions really support liberal anti-racist politics.

I think some of this stems as well from the whiteness of left institutions and sub-cultures. If we look back at the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers Party, and later New Left formations, in the post-WWII period they're caught in a situation where, on one side there are surging black popular struggles, and on the other, there's this drift towards suburban middle-class, maybe not conformity, but at least conservatism across the country. For many in these socialist organizations, they're trying to figure out how to be politically relevant in a context where the labor movement is on its heels institutionally and ideologically, and also they’re thinking about how to recruit blacks and join blacks in different struggles. And at the same time, they're trying to figure out a way to engage the broader white population, and I think that's where some of the black vanguardist ideas and the deference to black struggles comes from, and where the contemporary aversion of many self-styled socialists towards class analysis of black political life originates. I’m paraphrasing here, but the ex-communist Harold Cruse once lamented during the early sixties that many on the left could only see blacks when they were storming the barricades. What he meant, was that many white leftists were incapable of seeing blacks as a people with different classes, class interests, and complex internal political debates, conflicts and divergent aspirations. I’m afraid his words ring true in these times of Black Lives Matter.

We shouldn't just be chasing the next social struggle, or whatever the latest outrage might be, but rather thinking critically about the society and this historical moment in a fuller sense. And that's the tragic part about how many intellectuals and academics have latched on to the Black Lives Matter phenomenon uncritically and really relinquished their role as intellectuals. Instead of providing insight and critical thoughts on the moment, some have been reduced to the role of cheerleaders because of whatever cachet that might garner them. That's amazing to me and pisses me off to be honest. We should be doing the work that we were trained to do and that we're prepared to do, which is to offer more informed insights than what is immediately apparent.

Many left activists and academics continue to abide the notion of black exceptionalism, that there is something unique and incommensurable about the experiences of blacks that prohibits any substantive discussion of class position and interests whenever the black population is concerned. This posture is wrong and dangerous. It is not grounded in any close empirical sense of actually existing black life, but retreats toward the most unidimensional sense of the black population as noble, long-suffering victims of oppression and the moral conscience of a white-dominated nation, rather than a people possessing all the social contradictions, ideological diversity, foibles, heroism, and frailties found throughout the American populace. This failure to understand the complexities of black political life leaves intellectuals and activists unable to see the ways that particular segments of the black population, both elites and popular constituencies, have historically supported the carceral expansion and continue to play a crucial role in the reproduction of the highly unequal, unjust neoliberal urban order. Genuflecting before identitarian politics, whether under the guise of Black Power nostalgia or Black Lives Matter sloganeering, does little to help us understand and contest these power alignments. — "Who's Afraid of Left Populism?," Winter 2019.

Q: One thing that came out of the recent Black Lives Matter protests was this huge increase in sales for books dealing with racism. In early June, seven of the ten best-selling books on Amazon dealt with racism. On Barnes & Noble it was nine of ten, with books such as How to Be an Antiracist, White Fragility, and So You Want to Talk about Race topping the lists. Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow was also up there. In a recent interview you suggested that, as a result of all this, "the likely outcome [will be] that people will have some therapeutic conversations about race, but not engage in redistribution that is real underlying condition of police violence." I'm wondering if you could elaborate on this. And also, if you're critical of these books, then what are some other books that have a better chance of paving the way for the kind of substantive social change you're hoping to see?

A: That's a tough call. I think it is useful to situate the growing popularity of this anti-racist genre within that nexus of popular anti-policing struggles and the mass publishing industry. There have been powerful incentives and rewards for taking a particular kind of anti-racist perspective over the last few years. When you walk through an airport concourse, you get a glimpse of what is basically the pop charts of American publishing. Most of the books you’ll see on race are not critical or Marxist interpretations of American history and politics; you’re going to see Michelle Alexander, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robin DiAngelo, and so forth. If that’s what is being marketed and distributed en masse, of course that's what people are going to reach for. The thing with these books is that they don't really threaten anything, they call on us to stomp out what we are to believe is the offensive exception to how American society works. The underlying sense is that American capitalism brings a lot of good things to people, such as a home, a nice car, a certain version of the good life, leisure activities, travel, and so forth; that's not the problem if your starting and ending point is disparity. The problem is that there are some who have been historically excluded from that largely white middle-class project. I have tried to characterize this way of thinking as “militant racial liberalism”: it's strong in tone and carries a moral urgency but fundamentally it's not a threat to our capitalist political economy. It's simply saying that everybody should have these things, these rights to life, liberty, and property. It's upsetting to people that there is this contradiction within American history, this racial limit to American liberalism, and the idea is that we just need to correct that, close the racial wealth gap, deal with health disparities, and do the same when it comes to education and policing. But the problem for some of these anti-racists is not necessarily the capitalist order itself.

Black Lives Matter sentiment is essentially a militant expression of racial liberalism. Such expressions are not a threat but rather a bulwark to the neoliberal project that has obliterated the social wage, gutted public sector employment and worker pensions, undermined collective bargaining and union power, and rolled out an expansive carceral apparatus, all developments that have adversely affected black workers and communities. Sure, some activists are calling for defunding police departments and de-carceration, but as a popular slogan, Black Lives Matter is a cry for full recognition within the established terms of liberal democratic capitalism. And the ruling class agrees. — "The Triumph of Black Lives Matter and Neoliberal Redemption," June 2020.

The other thing I would push people to think about is that the task before us is not to undertake more reading. I mean, of course, I'm in favor of people being literate and knowledgeable. I think we should consume as much information as we can, but the bigger problem is the absence of spaces for public-spirited conversation, which might enable us to discover a life in common and deliberate over shared concerns, spaces where popular political will can be formed. By that I don't mean a particular place that we go to, but rather the quality of talk we have about the state of the country, how we might address common concerns, and so forth. And social media hasn't helped this. Social media I think has helped to reinforce and segregate conversations because we're not always learning how to engage beyond petty and episodic disagreements. If anything there's a tendency to do the opposite, you shame people, you write them off if they criticize what you have to say, and a lot of this has to do with the fact that there are usually no real stakes in these online conversations. That's different from being in an organization with somebody, or a local campaign where you're trying to deal with a problem of gangs and gun violence, for instance. If you're trying to talk to somebody about that, you're not going to go off on a potential ally; you're going to say: Can we move beyond the petty personal stuff, none of that matters right now, we need to focus on this particular problem that we all face and we're all concerned about. Real political struggles, real political activity, give gravity to our conversations that we don't necessarily have when we're dealing with people in the ethers of these online venues. We need more grounded political talk.

This is no small matter, and there is a tremendous amount of personal transformation that takes place when we are actively involved in real political formations. I think we need to be talking to people in the context of actively trying to solve the concrete problems that we have. That process transforms us. If I'm in an organization with people — this has happened to me many times before — I'm in a conversation with people who I might not otherwise deal with, or maybe I would disagree with them on other personal matters, ideology, or abstract political questions. But in this context where we share some similar immediate goals, I'm able to suspend all of that other nonsense and focus on what we have in common, and it may also change my views about these people. New friendships are forged, old prejudices and perceptions might dissolve, trust and solidarity take hold.

I'll give you an example. In the past I've been involved in groups with corporate lawyers and other people involved in the financial sector, and my armchair intellectual criticism might be that they work for institutions that reproduce a tremendous amount of inequality in our society. But in the context where we're trying to come up with concrete solutions to problems of gentrification, affordable housing, segregation, and the rest, I can't get caught up in the broader analysis of how they make their livings, not if we’re going to be allies. I have to think about what we can accomplish together as citizens, so there's a groundedness to that kind of political conversation that wouldn't exist if I was just interfacing with them online or in social settings.

Those who assert that liberal anti-racism is a necessary phase en route to a more viable working-class left politics either suffer from bad faith or are engaging in the worst form of pandering — namely, supporting black-led political tendencies uncritically as a means of demonstrating one's anti-racist commitments. Those who trade in such patronizing behavior either have not taken the time to study the history of black political life since the sixties or are simply willing to ignore the class contradictions that black communities share with the wider population. Those who cling to liberal anti-racism and defer to essentialist arguments about black interests fail to see that a politics that builds broad solidarity around commonly felt needs and interests is a form of anti-racism, one that we desperately need right now if we are to have any chance of ending the policing crisis and creating a more civilized society. — "The Panthers Can't Save Us Now," Spring 2017.

In terms of these study groups and therapeutic sessions that are now going to probably be pretty common within workplaces and other parts of society —there's potential there, right? There will be conversations about history and power that people may have never had before. I don’t think it is a complete dead-end. Some people will move on and perhaps branch out into more radical directions, but that's not necessarily guaranteed. Let me give you one correlate example that should dissuade us from over-investing in this particular notion of racial consciousness-raising as politics.

In the late '80s and early '90s there was the same sort of return to Black Power, an embrace of the Panthers and Malcolm X, among my generation of black people who came of age in that period. I was a teenager in the late '80s, and that was powerful for us. We were enthralled. Many of us committed passages of Malcolm X speeches to memory and would brandish them in debates whenever needed. On my black college campus and many others, lectures by different black intellectuals were often packed to capacity. No extra-credit was required by professors to spike attendance either. It was a lively time, and this intellectual culture wasn’t just limited to those in college or discussions at black book stores. For me, that period was formative, an introduction to intellectual life of a kind, and that happened within the context of also being involved in early political organizing, whether it was a fight against school consolidation when I was in high school, the fight against David Duke when he attempted to run for state-wide office twice in Louisiana, and joining opposition to the Iraq War and the death penalty in Louisiana. Those were activities I was involved in as a teen and a twenty-something, and those experiences shaped me in profound ways. There are many people who were my peers, who would say they were shaped by that milieu as well, which pushed many of us towards lives as academics or activists. But it wasn't enough. And it was also filled with all manner of conservative political thinking, including retrograde thinking about gender and patriarchy as well as valorization of black entrepreneurship and self-help, and some people are still stuck there. It's funny, when I go on Instagram or other social media where I follow some rappers and other musicians from that period, and they're still saying the exact same shit they were saying 30 years ago.

And that's the problem: With every social struggle or political crisis that unfolds, many rush to praise it as the beginning of something. And it is the beginning of something, but it could also be the end of any kind of progressive or radical changes if we don't push for that perspective, and if we don't insist on clarifying what the fundamental problems are. Like I said, back in the early '90s, a lot of us thought that the 1992 Rodney King rebellion was the beginning of some significant political transformation. And it was the beginning of something: black self-help, the origins of the Million Man March and the emergence of black popular consent for the neoliberal politics advanced during the 1990s. We need to be on guard and not relinquish our role as intellectuals. This may be the beginning of something politically important for some people, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't continue to insist on a critical interpretation of society as it exists.

Q: What about artistic production? Are there any forms of art that you feel provide support for the kinds of radical politics that you’re advocating for?

A: Of course there's a role for artists to play in providing us with ideas about what's possible, helping us to see past the limitations of our historical conditions and towards other horizons. Take something as simple as the memes that have been circulating during the pandemic: Those can achieve and provoke a change in consciousness much more readily than a book. Now, meme culture is a double-edged sword of course, because many people don't read beyond a few lines or whatever's allowed in the latest social media post, so that's a problem. But artists can still play that role — whether its musicians, visual artists, or filmmakers — they can really force us to see the society in a different way.

But it's hard. Black artists, particularly now, those who want to have some kind of commercial success and be widely read, seen or heard, face limited opportunities; their creative license is restricted because there's a socially prescribed role they're expected to play. It’s a shame, and this is a problem black cultural producers have lamented for some time. We are in a different situation than in the '60s or '70s when, for a time, you had some people writing for Hollywood who had been part of the Watts Writers Workshop, writing for Good Times and Sanford and Son and other shows that were on television. Many black actors, writers, and musicians came out of ‘60s social struggles and were still connected with those as the mass culture industry went through an unprecedented period of racial integration. You had tendencies like the Los Angeles Rebellion filmmakers, which included Julie Dash, Haile Gerima, and Charles Burnett, among others. They were film students at the University of California, Los Angeles, living and working in the aftermath of the Watts Rebellion in '65, so they were grounded, and at that moment saw filmmaking as playing a particular role within black liberation struggles.

We're a long way from that now. I think the last few years of Black Lives Matter protests have opened up space for better black filmmaking than we endured during the aughts. I am thinking of recent films like Queen and Slim, Black and Blue, Jordan Peele’s films like Get Out, and some others that reflect Black Lives Matter anti-racist themes. That said I still don't see films on the same artistic and critical intellectual level as like Bong Joon-ho's latest films [Parasite and Snowpiercer], a film like The Platform, or for that matter, films with the political sophistication of Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también and his adaptation of P.D. James’s Children of Men. Are we really supporting black producers, directors, and screenwriters who make films that break out of an industry-prescribed, formulaic template? I think a template for black commercial success in Hollywood was set by Spike Lee, John Singleton, and others during the late ‘80s, but the creative and political parameters have shrunk even tighter with the emergence of Tyler Perry’s cohort, and the emergence of a straight-to-streaming market. Of course, every now and then there's something that resonates and shatters the industry mold. I really enjoyed the spate of Bay Area films — The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Sorry to Bother You, and Blindspotting. And it was refreshing to see those as a potential opening for more creative, politically smart, and unconventional films, but I think generally there are strictures placed on black artists. Especially the ones that want to achieve mainstream audiences. They're expected to produce something that's acceptable to a mass audience, and that means generally something that's not so good. I just think we can do better. Maybe that's why it's great to have spaces where you can see all kinds of alternative filmmaking and smaller budget productions that usually aren't compromised in the same ways. I think Moonlight was great. Tangerine was great. Both were groundbreaking in terms of black LGBQT representations and perspectives, but I'm still waiting for an anti-capitalist black film of the sort that might be on the level of Bong Joon-ho or Cuarón.

Q: Here is a question from a buddy of mine, Kevin Chamow, who also has a piece in this issue: Do you give credence to the thesis that the latent function of academia is to corral the potential for revolutionary change into universities, and thus limit the potential for change while providing a "steam valve" of sorts for the airing of the hypocrisies and contradictions of "Liberal Democratic" government? Basically, has capitalism found a way to internalize its own critique, institutionalize, and in a way "buy off" its fiercest, smartest critics? Is answering this question within academia even hypothetically feasible given what we know about ideology and how it works to self-conceal?

A: That's a really good question. Personally, I think the migration of activists into academia is a complicated one. I've written about Harold Cruse and his story is somewhat representative. He landed a gig at the University of Michigan without having a PhD, because at that moment administrations were responding to black student demands for curricular change within universities, and so he landed this job just as largely white campuses were beginning to recruit more black faculty. For him it was a huge thing because he had never made that much money in his life. He hated leaving New York City, but he enjoyed the kind of lifestyle that he was able to have in Ann Arbor. He was making more money, he could travel, he owned a house, and he was at the very beginning of the creation of the Center for Afro-American and African Studies.

And his experience is replayed across the country. I completed a Master's degree in Black Studies from Ohio State University, and we actually had a community extension center that was built on the East Side of Columbus where they would teach classes and have public-facing events. I think the space could also be rented out for community purposes. Many other black studies programs either had a campus extension, or satellite set of classrooms in black neighborhoods. Most have remained constantly involved in local activism of one sort or another. As the mobilizations of the '60s and early '70s cooled, taking on an academic job was seen as something activists could do to continue their work, because many of these people were committed, many of them were auto-didacts, and they thought that that space would be a place where they could do the work, not a place that would transform the work itself. That was true as well for Women's Studies, Latinx Studies, Chicano Studies, Puerto Rican studies, Asian American studies, and all sorts of different programs, departments, and research centers and institutes.

This initial migration into academia is one that's taken on for a variety of different reasons. I think the issue is not so much of capitalism corralling these thinkers and these popular struggles, although there was some of that, but the bigger problem may be that once activists are established in academia, many of them begin to change the way they talk about society, change the way they think about the most important questions to ask. For some, those questions were no longer determined necessarily by what was happening in the world beyond the campus gates so much as by what’s happening in the context of academia, in terms of promotion, tenure and review processes, peer-reviewed processes at journals and presses, grant-making, and state fiscal pressures. The marginality of area studies programs and the need to justify their existence within this context of corporatization of the university only exacerbates these tensions.

Over the years, I've been in situations with colleagues who style themselves as radicals and revolutionaries but care very little about the conditions of poorly paid and overworked staff and contingent faculty on their own campuses. So unfortunately there's this odd style of intellectual life that's produced out of corporate academia, where the intellectual work of many academics speaks directly to real social conditions, the real problems facing people in the society, but at times, such work is shaped much more by institutional and professional norms and expectations, the pressures to produce in certain permissible ways, and by the entrepreneurial activity we’re compelled to pursue, especially in times of budget cuts. These pressures have shaped and compromised the utility of what many academics do. That might be the central contradiction: The initial activist migration produced a space where critical, engaged-intellectual life might have a chance to flourish, but now it's become a space where whatever activist concerns you might have must compete against all these countervailing forces in academia.

The last thing I'll say is academia still has a role to play, if you think about how illiberal society has become, since Trump and even before. Despite all the problems I’ve outlined, I think in the course of a semester we are still able to have a quality of civil engagement where learning and transformation can take place, with students, colleagues, and everyone else. The college classroom — and educational institutions more generally — is one of the last spaces where we can have true civic engagement. I think academia retains its importance in that regard, a place where you can engage people, where a certain civility prevails most of the time. I think that's something that's still important, and it's a reason why I've stayed committed to academia as a vocation, but there are all sorts of problems as with any other institution, and I think Chamow is right, it doesn't always engage with social struggles in the ways we would hope.

Q: I was really interested in a talk you gave last year, particularly in the fact that you spent so long, maybe ten minutes, clarifying the rules for the discussion. Your main point was that appeals to personal experience can be powerful, but they're not sufficient, and so you didn't want people to counter your analysis with personal anecdotes alone. This made me think of all the ways in which, in the contemporary discourse, we tend to give ultimate authority to the personal experience of minorities. We seem to have arrived at a situation where the personal experiences that minorities describe is something absolute, not subject to abstract argumentation in terms of appeals to history or economics or whatever. That seems to be both the case in academia as well as more generally. You wrote about this at length in your Catalyst piece: "The hegemony of identitarianism," you wrote, "has reshaped the terms of left political debate and action in at least three detrimental ways. First, it has engendered popular confusion about political life, leading many to falsely equate social identity with political interests. Second, it has distorted how we understand the work of building alliances not on identity as such, but on shared values and demonstrated commitment. Third, the practice of relying on racial or other identities as a means of authorizing speakers has had a corrupting effect on left political struggles. The result is a degraded public sphere where all manner of landmines prohibit honest discussion and impose limits on political constituency and left imagination, such as notions of 'epistemic deference,' 'mansplaining,' arbitrary stipulations about 'being an ally,' and so forth." Can you say a bit more about this, and whether you have any thoughts about the historical roots of this kind of dynamic?

A: The reason why you saw me preface my talk in that way at the Art Center College of Design is because I've dealt with the problem too many times in talks before. If I get up there and talk about growing up in Louisiana and taking students to prisons when I was 19, people perk up. The same is true if I were to talk about my top ten shittiest experiences with police, or those of my children and extended family. Many audiences are more interested in that than in hearing me go through a criticism of neoliberal political-economy, or the limitations of New Jim Crow–thinking about prisons and policing — that's a tougher sell. But if I get up and go autobiographical, that's an easy win. I actually want to engage people as citizens and try to pull us away from those dynamics of black surrogacy and white deference because I don't think either serves us particularly well. It allows people just to get off, to enjoy themselves, to share with their friends that they met some authentic black spokesperson, but they may not necessarily think about the real complex problems that we're facing.

In terms of the historical roots of the deference to minority or black perspectives, in my mind this takes shape or at least becomes a bit more concrete in the postwar years, and the emerging geography of that period. The birth of suburbia, where a version of success as consumer capacity becomes synonymous with the white middle class, and inner-city life is totally synonymous with black unemployment, poverty, disadvantages, and dispossession. I think that period sets up a landscape where people are born and raised in these new segregated spaces — which are different from the urban ethnic enclaves before WWII and the town and country segregation of the Jim Crow South — and so they start to think of the experiences of other groups and races as regions they could never imagine or fully experience. Along with that new spatial situation comes the cultural reach of television, which serves as a primary source of news, leisure, and vicarious experience for millions of Americans. White suburbanites see what's happening in Little Rock, Arkansas or Montgomery, Alabama, and they imagine that it's so far away, so different from what they know, what they understand. So the racial problem becomes crucial in the post-war period because it stands out in sharp contrast to the professed ideals of our country, as well as the ways in which many Americans are experiencing for the first time in their lives a certain level of material comfort and consumer capacity. Many of these people who grew up in the Depression and lived through or even served in the Second World War are now enjoying the fruits of American capitalism in ways they had never known. So I think that dissonance is part of where the notion of black exceptionalism in our own times comes from, you have blacks who are ghettoized, blacks who lived under Jim Crow segregation, their experiences are different; even if they're part of consumer society in a nominal sense, they're still relegated to the back door and the segregated fountains and bathrooms, or in Northern cities to dilapidated slum settlements and then to public housing which eventually becomes just as hellish as the slums it replaced. There is some truth to that; the experience of blacks was generally different from that of many whites.

During this same post-war period, we see an upsurge of slum autobiographies, such as Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land and Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets. Also, Malcolm X's autobiography is probably the most well known and enduring of this genre. Those literary works become popular during that period, and they treat white readers to a world they likely cannot experience except through literature or television. You've got blacks who are serving as these important interpreters of the broader black experience for white audiences. I think that's where the contemporary dynamics are set in place, in the postwar urban transformation and the way that process of social and economic re-segregation is refracted and made legible through the culture industry. The conflicts and fears over black power and ghetto rebellion intensify these dynamics of black vanguardism and white deference. Many black activists were dependent on white largesse and they're appealing to white churches, other institutions, and private donors, and they also draw on that same dynamic, that they represent a set of experiences in a world that is inaccessible to whites.

And there's some truth to that: I'm not trying to say it's not real. But I think it's less real now. I think you see people who evoke that sense of the Black Everyman, the person who knows what no white person can ever know; but it doesn’t always hold up. I feel that way about some of the popular black writers who still write as if they are the Black Everyman, and even the entertainers and athletes, and for that matter multi-millionaires, who talk about George Floyd's experience as though it's their own. There's nothing wrong with identifying with Floyd. If you’re a decent human being you should, but it's a bit of a stretch to argue that a millionaire's experience is the same as someone like Floyd. Speaking the authentic racial voice still has power as a rhetorical and literary strategy, it still works as a way to leverage audiences and to evoke a certain kind of concern, but it is also dishonest in some moments.

Unfortunately, the arrival of the black intellectual as gadfly and conscience of the nation in the television era bore a new set of problems. Too many well-meaning whites mistook their guilt and pleasure of self-flagellation for genuine unity with blacks and authentic antiracist political commitment — in other words, solidarity. That problem of replacing politics with public therapy endures to this day, and it flourishes in a context where social media linkages surrogate other historical forms of social interchange and collective action. Antiracist liberalism thrives in a context where the performance of self-loathing, outrage, and concern are easily traded public currency, instead of the more socially costly politics of public sacrifice and the redistribution of societal resources. — "An Open Letter to Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Liberals Who Love Him," February 2016.

I think the other reason why it becomes so powerful is that people tend to believe first-person stories, that if somebody's lived a certain life, they have some kind of insider knowledge. I think some of this on our part, however, is laziness and anti-intellectualism, and perhaps the result of a few decades of cable news and afternoon talk-show gruel, which often place experts side-by-side with authentic spokespersons as though scientific inquiry and experiential knowledge are somehow equal.

Q: I want to end by asking you about fascism. More and more academics and activists are using the term to describe what's going on in the world. The Marxist philosopher Alberto Toscano, for example, has written some interesting things about this lately. And I was wondering two things: One, do you think it's appropriate to label what's going on in the US as fascist? And two, do you think whether or not we call our government fascist is important in the kind of political responses we espouse. In other words, does the type of enemy we're up against dictate our tactics? As Kevin Chamow recently put it, if the enemy is a neoliberal, you argue with them, but if it's a fascist, you punch them.

A: At least in the US, I don’t think the popular consent is there yet, which would be necessary to say we’ve reached a fascist moment. Of course, Trump has brought the precipice into full view. I mean, we have seen the rise of fascist groups, racist militia and anti-immigrant organizations, which is disturbing, and the Trump administration has legitimated these forces. I've had people write to me, alt-right responses that have nothing to do with my work, but because they saw the title of something I wrote, they felt the need to spew, albeit sometimes politely. These forces are emboldened, and I think for a while talk radio was essential for spreading these ideas. Now it's media like 4chan, where they're able to engage in conversations that are illiberal and reactionary without the constraints of engaging broad publics or honoring civil discourse. I'm glad that some people are writing about this, and that organizations have been tracking these white supremacist groups and extreme right-wing tendencies for a few decades.

In terms of analyzing this, I like the concept offered by Stuart Hall back in the '70s. He used the term "authoritarian populism" to describe our situation where you still have these democratic institutions, but they're dominated by capital, as far as elections, campaign financing and lobbying. We have a semblance of democratic institutions in place, but they're not necessarily functioning well for the greatest number of us. We can win some battles sometimes, but ultimately those liberal institutions were designed to perpetuate the status quo and to protect the interests of the capitalist class.

Trumpism appeals to the real economic anxieties of those Americans who can recall the last days of a vibrant manufacturing-based economy. His protectionist ideas as well as his xenophobia beckon many Americans, not just whites, back to a nostalgic ideal of unending compound growth and middle-class consumption. This is where the legitimacy of the current carceral order resides, and it is unlikely that progressive left forces can create a more just alternative without engaging broad swaths of the population, wrestling with real and imagined anxieties, fears, and felt needs. Indeed, that is the only way to turn the tide against Trump’s authoritarian populism and produce a more just, egalitarian society. — "Who's Afraid of Left Populism?" Winter 2019.

The presence of formal democratic institutions and very little real democracy produces alienation that manifests in different ways. For black activists and black publics, we have to say Black Lives Matter, we have to reassert that we deserve equal protection in the midst of neoliberal austerity and reactionary backlash. For some whites who live in parts of the country that have been left behind by deindustrialization and globalized production, embracing the kind of right-wing populism of somebody like Donald Trump makes sense to them because he's not a Washington elite, he's not a Beltway guy. He's still an elite, but he self-presents in a way and emotes with his fandom in a manner that gives the impression he's just like them — a political outsider. He's not concerned with focus groups; he's not waiting to hear what the latest poll says before he makes a decision. He sounds like he's being authentic and honest, he's irreverent and even funny at times, and clearly his base can relate to that, and so did enough of the American electorate for him to become president.

I'm not opposed to thinking about what we're going through in terms of fascism, but I think what we're experiencing today might actually be more volatile and dangerous than the references to historical fascism suggest. I wonder how helpful it is to make those comparisons or to draw on a 20th-century phenomenon, one that really took hold in smaller countries by comparison to the contemporary United States. Because what we have here are multiple things happening at once. On one side there are parts of the country that are becoming majority-minority, that are at least center-left in terms of prevailing public sentiments on questions of abortion and reproductive rights, matters of racial equality, labor rights, social welfare, and public health spending and other progressive issues. The country is veering towards becoming more progressive and more cosmopolitan, a new majority. But then on the flip side, there are parts of the country where citizens are openly hostile towards the same progressive and liberal values. There are also these darker forces at play that could be much more volatile. You don't need a full army anymore to wreak mass destruction, and you don't need large numbers of the public committed to right-wing ideas either; as we’ve seen in continuous mass shooting incidents, a lone actor or small group of people with nefarious goals in mind can terrorize the masses. I don't know how helpful discussions of fascism are for thinking about those realities of a vast and politically divided nation, and an increased capacity for mass terror even without a military. It would seem this particular set of conjunctures might require new concepts and analyses.