Base and Superstructure

Thoughts on production, alienation, and ideology

Month: July 2024 (Page 1 of 2)

A photo of Donald Trump holding up his fists in front of an American flag.

Trump’s Victory Plan

July 29, 2024 /

Donald Trump has dominated news coverage in the U.S. for over 9 years. But in all that time, liberals and even leftists still haven’t learned much about how he operates. His politics remain a mystery to them, sparking widespread and ineffective reaction.

I made my first attempt at mapping Trump’s rhetoric way back in 2018. In that post, I said a few words about how Trump selects his topic and audience.

I’ll build on that post in this one. But this time our topic is how Trump uses hyperbole, unclear language, and provocative behavior to generate overreaction from his Democratic opponents.

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A photo of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris engaging with a crowd.

Identitarians Can’t Explain Harris

July 22, 2024 /

The tide turned hard against the Biden campaign about a week after the debate, around the July 4 holiday.  When it happened, my thoughts turned to an old debate at the heart of this blog.

Across many posts, I ask the question: what force drives society at its most fundamental level? At the ground, do we find a system of class relations and class conflict? Or do we find identities such as race and gender? Marxists argue for the former, while identitarians argue for the latter.

Joe Biden’s decision to step down in favor of Kamala Harris suggests, strongly, that it can’t be the latter. At the very least, it suggests the left-leaning version of identitarianism doesn’t work. And the far right version never made much sense, anyway.

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The title of the TV show The Connors, with characters Becky and Darlene sitting on a couch facing one another.

The Conners and the Working Class

July 15, 2024 /

A few years ago, I had some thoughts on the working class politics of the returned TV show Roseanne. The gist of it is that I thought the show played Roseanne’s title character in a plausible way. Yes, they turned her from a fairly left-leaning working class woman into a Trump supporter. But they did so in a way that rang true to her character and the character’s likely development.

Fast forward a few years. Now I’ve had a chance to watch most of seasons 2 and 3 of The Conners, the updated version of the show after Roseanne herself got booted.

What do I see here?

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