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William Connolly, Aspirational Fascism

Written in 2017, Connolly’s book tries to make sense of the rise of Trump.  Connolly had previously written about the emergence of the capitalist/evangelical resonance machine in 2005, during the height of Bush era militarism, which was driven by a combination of evangelical belief in a Manichean conception of American exceptionalism and capitalist vision of globalized free market democracy, to be won by means of the defeating terrorism and in the context of Latin America, democratic populism.  Drawing on the work of  Greg Grandin, the evangelical resonance machine is the last gasp of the frontier tradition – the last sustained effort to ameliorate internal tensions by means of outward expansion.  The failure of this project leads to the Trump era, although not inevitably (there was a lot of bad luck involved).  Connolly opens his essay by talking about Nietzche’s conception of genealogy – an enterprise oriented toward pulling apart the apparent solidity of ins...
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Federalism and class struggle

Very interesting New York Times article,  “Powerful Meat Industry Holds Sway After Trump’s Order,”   on Trump’s decision to invoke the Defense Production Act to reopen meatpacking plants in the midwest.  Part of the story here is the concentration of the meatpacking so that just a few corporations account for a large proportion of meat production in the US - indeed, there are individual plants that account for a significant proportion of meat production.  These have been shut down by local authorities over public health concerns - in particular, over the spread of Covid-19.  This happened belatedly, after red state governors in the Midwest has refused to implement social distancing measures, regarding themselves as somehow exempt from the coronavirus.  South Dakota was a particularly egregious example of this.  Covid outbreaks at these facilities forced their hand.  The result, though, was for the big meat processors like Tyson to warn that the n...
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