Base and Superstructure

Alienation, autonomy, and ideology

Category: Partisan Politics (Page 2 of 18)

A highway road sign for entry into the town of Preemption, Illinois.

Trump and the Politics of Perpetual Preemption

February 10, 2025 / / 0 Comments

Way back in 2018, not long after I began this blog, I posted about how Donald Trump – in the midst of his first presidency – fits into the established political order. I did so with the help of political scientist Stephen Skowronek. In the 1990s, he published the book The Politics Presidents Make to much acclaim.

Skowronek divided U.S. history into a series of political orders, with each president defined by their position with respect to the dominant order. Depending on political circumstances and their own politics, presidents use their power to create (reconstruct), defend and innovate (articulate), oppose (preempt), or fumble and destroy (disjoin) the dominant political order.

In the previous post, I read Trump as a disjunctive president. I thought he would mark the final death of the Reagan political order. Given his low popularity from 2016 to 2018, and his subsequent defeat in the 2020 election, I think that prediction turned out right.

But then he won in 2024 by about 2 million votes* (see note at bottom).

When a president fumbles the existing disorder and crashes and burns along with it, that isn’t supposed to happen! They’re supposed to be done with politics. Disjunctive presidents stand among our least popular in history.

So, what happened? How could Trump have come back from his disastrous 2020 result?

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An imagine of the Johnson County Iowa Board of Supervisors meeting room.

White Liberal Guilt Goes 0 for 2

November 11, 2024 /

Complaining aside, there’s a lot to like about politics in Iowa City. We have little in the way of genuine right wing politics, for one. Sometimes we even hold elections where all candidates genuinely want to use government to solve problems.

That’s nice.

But on the flip side, white liberal guilt is one of our biggest vices, as one might expect in a place so dominated by highly educated, mostly white progressives. White liberal guilt causes lots of problems for us.

It forms a serious barrier to our leftist political scene, a barrier we rarely notice. Our activist scene is large enough that we fill our orgs with the ‘usual suspects,’ i.e., people already integrated into one of Iowa City’s activist subcultures. These communities are predominantly white, well educated, LGBTQ heavy, and constantly concerned about their lack of non-white members.

And while I focused in the last paragraph on activists, the same point applies to liberal and progressive politics more generally.

It’s not a problem that Iowa City progressives and leftists worry about their lack of black members. Indeed, they should worry about it. Unfortunately, the white liberal guilt they carry blocks them from addressing the issue in a satisfying way.

Here’s the quick story. In a place with a critical mass of white, well educated, wealthy progressives, those local progressives turn inward. They talk only to each other, disconnected from the realities of working-class life.

Many working in the Marxist tradition would call this an ‘ultra-left’ tendency. I prefer to call it ‘ultra-progressive,’ as most people in this camp don’t actually hold leftist views. But no matter what one calls it, it blocks real orgs from recruiting across racial lines.

And that’s bad.

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Election Predictions: 2024 Edition

November 4, 2024 /

I’m starting another round of election predictions with a bit of dread. Not because the election is a particularly uncertain one (though it is). And not because this election presents the possibility of another Trump administration (though it does).

Rather, my sense of dread comes from the fact that the left hardly has any skin in the game.

Democrats have long catered to moderate voters. But the Kamala Harris campaign really cranked this trend into overdrive. She campaigns to the right on issues like immigration. And she has wrapped her campaign around winning over so-called ‘Never Trump’ Republicans.

In other words, Harris campaigns with roughly the politics of a Bob Dole or Mitt Romney. Maybe she won’t govern that way if she wins – though she might. But the mere fact that she thinks she can get away with this shows the relative powerlessness of the political left in the U.S.

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The painting American Progress by John Gast, which depicts an angelic figuring rising from the American countryside.

The 2024 Election and U.S. Exceptionalism

September 16, 2024 /

In his account of the political rise of Benjamin Netanyahu, Guy Laron lays out a framework we could apply to the politics of many countries.

Laron describes how Netanyahu gradually fused together a coalition between business interests, religious fundamentalists, and disaffected working class people. He did so by using state power to tie these groups together under his leadership. For instance, he used the promise of housing and resources under a settler colonialist regime to tie ultra-Orthodox religious people to his political project.

Israel thereby stands out as but one example of a politics that has degenerated into a rivalry between technocratic liberalism (e.g., the Labor Party in Israel, Labour in the UK, the Socialists in France, and so on) on one hand and a xenophobic far right that occasionally represents the interests of a segment of the working class, on the other. We find many such examples.

But that’s not how things work in at least one country – the United States.

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