Russian propagandist says the Kremlin is making “preparations” for future interference in American elections
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Eastman pushed top Wisconsin Republican Robin Vos to “nullify” results and “reclaim” electors awarded to Biden
It’s remarkable: For more than a year, it’s been impossible to describe any world leader as a version of the sitting U.S. president. Run this thought experiment yourself: Who might be the “Joe Biden of South America”? Or “Central Europe’s Biden”? You draw a blank. What a contrast from the four years in which the world contained Hungary’s Trump, Brazil’s Trump, India’s Trump, Turkey’s Trump, the Philippines’ Trump, and so many more. The parallels between these leaders and Trump were chilling, but they were also a boon for the geopolitical commentariat: the sundry experts, analysts, specialists, and columnists who used them to give an intelligible shape to troubling developments in places far from the United States. The stakes were uncontestably high, and the conditions for analogy, the Swiss Army knife of such professions, had never been so ripe.
The Age of the Strongman: How the Cult of the Leader Threatens Democracy Around the World by Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs columnist for the Financial Times, is one of several new books that attempt to explain today’s authoritarians as a single phenomenon by slotting their rise and their “playbooks”—a favorite term of these analyses—into a unifying framework. See also: Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present by American historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, from November 2020, and The Revenge of Power: How Autocrats Are Reinventing Politics for the 21st Century, published in February 2022 by Venezuelan commentator Moisés Naím.
In these books, strongmen heads of state are a stock character type with common strategies. They build their appeal around a standard checklist of issues, including inequality, migration, and crises of group and national identity. They share, in Rachman’s words, “a cult of personality” and “a politics driven by fear and nationalism.” Naím focuses on what he calls “3P autocrats,” who are initially elected, but then “dismantle the checks on executive power through populism, polarization, and post-truth.” Ben-Ghiat adds the dimension of “virility,” examining how the strongman’s “displays of machismo” and “kinship with other male leaders” help him menace women and LGBTQ+ populations, inform reckless foreign policy, and enable corruption. Above all, the emergence of these leaders is presented in these books as an assault on democracy itself. Ben-Ghiat calls their rise a “turn away from democracy,” Rachman heralds “the most sustained global assault on liberal democratic values since the 1930s,” and Naím warns that “at stake is not just whether democracy will thrive in the twenty-first century but whether it will even survive as the dominant system of government, the default setting in the global village.”
It’s a powerful theory: that one recognizable character type might explain the retreat of democracy in so many countries across the world, and that simply recognizing this type of leader, and the tools he wields, is the first step to dismantling his power. Yet these books’ personality-driven approach makes it difficult to examine the structures that elevated such leaders in the first place—including a sometimes naïve, sometimes willfully blind Western press. Do such leaders really have as much in common as these authors tend to suggest? And do their personalities tell us more than the political systems, economic structures, and distinct histories of their countries? Rachman’s book, with its clubby breakfasts and high-altitude interviews, is a particularly concentrated application of this method, and particularly revealing of its limitations.
Gideon Rachman got his start in journalism as a young BBC World Service reporter in the 1980s, during the final years of the Cold War and the seeming triumph of liberal democracy. As a foreign correspondent and editor, he took assignments in Washington, D.C. (where he was posted when the Berlin Wall fell), Bangkok (which he left during the year the Asian financial crisis started), and early 2000s Brussels (at the zenith of postwar EU proceduralism). He spent 15 years at The Economist, that genteel British voice of centrism and free markets, and 15 more at the FT, the salmon-pink British business broadsheet where he remains today. He started to notice cracks in the post–Cold War order with Putin’s autocratic turn, the 2008 financial crisis, and Xi Jinping’s ascendance in 2012. In this century, his remit as a columnist with the entire world as his beat led him to cover repressive rulers in Turkey, Hungary, India, and beyond. After the twin shocks of Brexit and Trump, he finally spotted a “global trend.”
In The Age of the Strongman, he profiles 14 world leaders, some elected and some not, who have changed the “climate of global politics over the last twenty years.” Together, he writes, they constitute a “revolt against the liberal consensus that reigned supreme after 1989.” As different as these leaders are, he believes their success has eroded the “prestige of the American liberal democratic model” in the twenty-first century. (He includes in his autocrat roster Boris Johnson, who has a brusque style and demagogic tone, but whose techniques remain a far cry from, say, directly jailing journalists or starting wars; despite Rachman’s justifications, his inclusion seems a little forced.) Rachman also excludes autocrats like Cambodia’s Hun Sen and Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenko for leading countries that are not large or influential enough to really shape global politics, though he admits they “have strongman traits.”
First in his catalog is Vladimir Putin, who took power in Russia on the very last day of the twentieth century. Rachman first met him at—of course—Davos. He admits that his initial view of Putin, circa 2000, was as a “relatively reassuring figure” who seemed outwardly enthusiastic about elections and a free press. Then comes a capsule Putin biography: the modest St. Petersburg flat, the KGB years, the meteoric rise through the post-Soviet Kremlin. Rachman writes that he began to pay attention to Putin’s anti-Western project in 2007, when Putin “denounced Western talk of freedom and democracy as a hypocritical front for power politics” at the Munich Security Conference. In the following decade, Putin emerged as a full-fledged autocrat with his invasion of Crimea, intervention in Syria, brazen imprisonment of activists and journalists, and more. The chapter concludes abruptly that, while Putin’s longevity has been unexpected, his regime’s days may nevertheless be numbered, because his Russia is an “international pariah” with a “shrinking and aging” population and a dependence on its oil and gas revenue, and his rule “rests not on success and popular consent but on force and repression.” Nothing in this account is controversial, but it’s not particularly illuminating either.
Rachman calls Putin “the archetype” from whom other strongmen take their cues. In the next chapters, he describes how Recep Tayyip Erdoğan implemented a brutal crackdown on civil liberties, ushered in sweeping anti-secular legislation, and maneuvered an unprecedented concentration of executive power in Turkey. He recounts Xi Jinping’s brutal “anti-corruption” drive to purge opposition in China, his ruthless press crackdown, the massive Uighur concentration camps, and the cold-blooded suppression of Hong Kong’s democracy protests. He writes of Narendra Modi’s dangerous Hindu nationalist spin on the world’s largest democracy (though his descriptions of Modi’s disastrous handling of Covid, his annexation of Kashmir, and attempts to strip Muslims’ citizenship in Assam are curiously muted). He presents Hungary’s Viktor Orbán as the paragon of a “new breed of populist right-wingers” in Europe who are enemies of “Brussels-style liberalism.” These leaders have all done monstrous things in their own right, but in such a dry litany, their track records blend together.
On rare occasions when the strongmen use their own words to discuss their rejection of liberal democracy, Rachman doesn’t spend much time on their arguments. Orbán in particular is the theorist among them, discussing his politics in the same terms as Western commentators. He has, for instance, directly “caricatured liberalism as an elitist ideology, favored by ‘globalists,’ intent on erasing national borders and cultures,” which would have been well worth a direct counterargument from Rachman. Other missed chances for Rachman to respond to autocrats’ own ideas include Putin’s long-running critique of NATO expansion and Erdoğan’s rejection of secularism as essential to a modern nation-state’s politics. Instead of examining those propositions, or the material grievances that created a vacuum for so many of them, Rachman sees each of these leaders, broadly, as a “symptom of the crisis in liberalism.”
The book’s insider approach is wanting even on its own terms. Despite Rachman’s direct access to some of the most powerful people in the world, he garners few genuine insights from his encounters with them—only a handful of colorful anecdotes. He has had an audience with Xi alongside Gordon Brown and Google’s Eric Schmidt, breakfasted with Emmanuel Macron, and met Boris Johnson at a country wedding, but such episodes are recounted in flat paraphrase. There are occasional memorable details: an aside in which he reveals that a hard-of-hearing George Soros makes his dinner guests speak into a microphone; a description of a mobile app, shown to him by a friend in China, that teaches “Xi Jinping Thought” and quizzes its more than 100 million users on what they’ve learned. Rachman also occasionally picks the perfect artifact to support his broader thesis, like 2020 campaign posters for Benjamin Netanyahu that include Modi, Trump, and Putin. More such details could have lent credence to the book’s proposition that today’s autocrats are worth studying in concert.
When it comes to sources, moving almost exclusively among elites has its limits. The range of people who help Rachman form his worldview, both as a columnist and an author, is narrow. The sources he quotes in the book include “a European head of state,” “friends of mine working in the media in Hungary,” “political analysts,” “a leading German intellectual,” “a Princeton professor and expert on populism,” “a heavily bearded intellectual and billionaire,” “one prominent Beijing academic,” “one internationally respected scholar,” and “one CEO.” Instead of vivifying details, we get one too many anonymized quotes stating the obvious: “As one prominent Beijing academic complained to me,” he recounts, “‘We are increasingly living in a totalitarian state.’” And facile comparisons such as: “As one senior British official put it to me, ‘My question is whether [Mohammed bin Salman] is more like Lee Kuan Yew or Saddam Hussein.’”
The rare critique with bite in these pages comes from, of all places, Boris Johnson’s Eton housemaster. “Boris seems affronted when confronted with what amounts to a gross failure of responsibility,” he writes to the Johnson parents. “I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation that binds everyone else.”
Trump’s election in 2016 provides the book’s turning point: In some ways, writes Rachman, Trump’s win was “just part of an established global trend.” Yet “the unique economic and cultural power of the US meant that Trump’s ascent changed the atmosphere of global politics, strengthening and legitimizing the strongman style, and giving rise to a wave of emulators.” In the book’s post-Trump half, autocrats are presented with increasingly Trump-like features, or as planets orbiting his authoritarian sun. Rodrigo Duterte peddles “fake news” in the Philippines, and Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is a princeling just like Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner: “extremely rich men in their thirties, who owed their position in life to their families.” Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, like Trump, was spurned by intellectuals but beloved by “small-town and rural” parts of his country, and, also like Trump, “had built a huge personal following through social media and used shocking rhetoric to make himself stand out.”
Trump was indeed reported to have unusually good rapport with other strongmen: He was the type of world leader who called Duterte to praise his murderous war on drugs, and who admiringly referred to Erdoğan “the Sultan.” But at some point, the endless comparisons drag. Not only are all strongmen presented as fundamentally alike, but they also start to look and sound fundamentally like Trump. “As with Trump’s various false claims about immigration, such as that immigrants are disproportionately responsible for crime, Duterte’s purported drug epidemic became a focus for more general anxieties and insecurities,” writes Rachman, which does not reveal much more than that one political leader stoked fear and another political leader also stoked fear. “Like Trump, Bolsonaro was a compulsive Tweeter,” but unlike Trump, Bolsonaro had never “built and led a major business.” Nothing is a coincidence after 2016: The anti-Brexit Remainers get Boris Johnson’s decision to prorogue Parliament overturned on the “very day that the House of Representatives in Washington DC announced impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump…. suggesting that there was a rule-of-law crisis building on both sides of the Atlantic.”
I know from experience that it’s hard not to recount all foreign news in an American accent. Much of my own career as a foreign correspondent took place in the Trump era. My first and last stories from Indonesia, in 2016 and 2020, were both about Trump’s shady business there. I also wrote about “fake news” in Southeast Asia, and read more into Steve Bannon’s European exploits than I probably should have. Those were also the main types of stories editors would buy, and the ones American readers would click on the most. That’s to say, the real-time incentives to keep one’s Trump blinders on were steep.
Writing at last in the post-Trump era, Rachman is self-aware enough to note that Trump’s election was unique in many ways: that Trump faced more checks and balances than his analogues, thanks to the “institutions and political conventions that had developed over centuries of democratic politics” in the United States. Still, the book’s very structure, cleaved in half by the 2016 U.S. election, makes every leader appear as either a forerunner or an analogue to Trump. The effect can be especially absurd for leaders who were not elected by grievance-ridden citizenries of their own. Consider Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS: He rose to power in his thirties by charting a Machiavellian warpath through his own large family, which included locking up his rival—a diabetic cousin—in a room without insulin, during Ramadan, until he gave up his claim to the crown. This bears no similarity to the Electoral College head-scratcher that gave us Trump. Moreover, MBS will never be subject to a vote and will probably reign for decades, whereas Trump was voted out after just one term. For MBS, being a strongman is less about decrying “fake news” than about jailing Wahhabi clerics, and his rise to power was simply not a referendum on populism, migration, or the post–Cold War consensus. Rachman’s chapter on him amounts to announcing: Here’s yet another autocrat. Such parts dilute the analytical power of the whole.
One reason for all these ongoing, irresistible comparisons to Trump may be that comparing Trump to foreign tyrants was the best way the global pundit class could think of to condemn and warn against the former. And this book’s central concern, despite its conceit, is not so much the fate of democracy across the world as it is American democracy and its unique importance to the rest of the world. One of the biggest problems caused by Trump, in Rachman’s account, was that the United States could no longer serve as a model to other nations. Rachman asks plaintively: “How can America lead a pushback against strongman authoritarianism, when its own democracy is so gravely wounded?”
Rachman still believes that the “American-led order” is the antidote to the age of strongmen. His epilogue is largely about President Biden, who he believes must not only help save America’s own democracy, but focus on “supporting political liberty elsewhere in the world.” There is, he writes, “no plausible alternative to America that could play that role.” These statements come to us preserved in amber from a time before the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Western opinion-formers have often mistaken autocrats for friends and tyrants for reformers.
Though strongman books urge the public to recognize the features of authoritarian rule, “Western opinion-formers,” as Rachman dubs his own class of writers, have often failed at this task, mistaking autocrats for friends and tyrants for reformers. Not just Putin but also several other villains of this book once received rather favorable coverage in the Western media, including from the author himself. “Looking back at this catalogue of naive predictions and dashed hopes, it is interesting to ask why Western commentators kept getting it wrong,” Rachman writes in the introduction, surveying a decade’s worth of his industry embracing early iterations of leaders like Modi, Xi, Erdoğan, and MBS. In his chapter on Ethiopia’s Abiy Ahmed, Rachman notes that “the Age of the Strongman has involved a recurrent pattern. A charismatic new leader emerges somewhere in the world. He is portrayed in the Western media as a liberal reformer. Western politicians and institutions weigh in with encouraging comments and offers of assistance. Then, as time passes, awkward facts emerge…. Disillusionment sets in.”
Since Rachman has written about, and in many cases met, the leaders in this book, he could have examined his own analytical errors more closely, alongside those of his peers. The potential of that far more interesting book, focusing on media discourse about this century’s autocrats rather than the men themselves, haunts this one. When Rachman does reference his past work, his reflections are slight. Recalling a 2014 column in which he called Modi “thrilling,” he simply notes, “Today, having witnessed Modi’s cavalier attitude to civil rights, I would choose a different word.” As for a 2011 column titled “DON’T BE BLIND TO ERDOĞAN’S FLAWS,” about the Turkish leader’s crackdown on dissent, he notes in parentheses that the headline was “admittedly timid.” He doesn’t go further into the judgment errors of Western journalists at the time; there’s no genuine postmortem, for instance, of the way they underrated the violent extensions of religious nationalism (as with Modi) or let themselves be blinded by a leader’s superficial embrace of technology (as with MBS).
Even if we did somehow, through induction, get better at spotting autocrats based on the case studies here, it’s unclear what we’re supposed to do once we accurately label some leader a strongman. Rachman does not offer any clear direction for reinvigorating democracy. As the historian David Bell has written, if Trump did not succeed in doing more damage to American democracy, it was not because he failed to properly implement the authoritarian “playbook”: “It was also because of deeply rooted democratic structures and habits. And it was also because of powerful social forces that achieve their ends very well within the parameters of our current political system.” In its focus on the selection of good or bad leaders, Rachman’s book overlooks that democracy is grounded in the people and in political structures that provide possibilities for participation.
Absent real guiding questions or answers, this book ends in a hopeless place. The solutions presented in The Age of the Strongman can be summed up as: Wait. Wait for elderly leaders to finally step down or lose (as Netanyahu did, after 12 years), or for an economy to collapse (as Russia’s might, under the weight of sanctions and a turn away from its fossil fuels), or until the United States somehow saves the day. What else, indeed, can the subjects of increasingly fragile liberal democracy do against such enormous tides?
Republicans don’t really think liberals are “grooming” children — but they know saying so is permission to violence
The hosts fear the unchecked power that will be abused if he’s able to stack enough states in his favor
The author of the new Common Notions book, On Microfascism: Gender, War, and Death, recently sat down for an interview with Free City Radio. To learn more about the book, listen to the interview or see below for more information. The book is now available at LeftWingBooks.net.
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Rooted in an understanding of how the fascist body is constructed, we can develop the collective power to dismember it.
Fascist and reactionary populist forces have undeniably swelled in the US in recent years. To effectively counter fascist movements, we need to understand them beyond their most visible and public expressions. To do this, Jack Bratich asserts, we must dig deeper into the psyche and body that gives rise to fascist formations. There we will find microfascism, or the cultural ways in which a fascist understanding of the world is generated from the hatreds that suffuse everyday life.
By highlighting the misogyny at fascism’s core, we are able to observe a key process in the formation of a fascist body. Recognizing the microfascism behind appeals to recover the past glory of white male subjects created by earlier foundational wars, we see how histories of settler colonialism, genocide, and domination are animating the deadly mission of fascism today. By focusing on the variety of ways the resurgent fascist tendency courts its own destruction (and demands the destruction of others), we can trace how fascism refines and expands the death and annihilation that underpins capitalist, colonial, and patriarchal systems.
The implications of On Microfascism are far-reaching and unsettling. Still, Bratich insists, the new fascism is not as powerful as its adherents wish us to believe. To defeat it, we must develop and defend a “micro-antifascism” grounded in the ethics of mutual aid and care in the everyday. Rooted in an understanding of how the fascist body is constructed, we can develop the collective power to dismember it.
About the Author
Jack Z. Bratich is professor in the Journalism and Media Studies Department at Rutgers University. He is author of Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture and coeditor of Foucault, Cultural Studies, and Governmentality.
What People Are Saying
“On Microfascism stands out as a uniquely important offering, in which Bratich goes further and deeper than most every text dedicated to naming and understanding the fascism(s) of today. In this rigorous and righteous book, Bratich rightly insists on the insufficiency of seeing fascism only when it arises in State regime form. Through which subjectivities, practices, hierarchies and cultural forms do fascistic constellations permeate and grow? Bratich’s razor-sharp analysis provides invaluable answers, and in so doing, offers a crucial tool for antifascist praxis.” Natasha Lennard, author of Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life
“On Microfascism is a profoundly original and compelling analysis of fascism’s deep roots in Western traditions of patriarchy. By pinpointing the foundational role of the concept of autogenetic sovereignty and charting its many implications for how we live and die, Bratich equips readers with the intellectual framework necessary to wage not only an anti-fascist struggle, but an anti-microfascist struggle.” Mark Bray, author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook
“It was hard to miss the wake-up call: fascism is back, no doubt about it, but in the novel formations of a micro-fascist culture that is directing the contemporary production of subjectivity. Jack Bratich not only undertakes a probing analysis of the mechanisms of the misogynistic, racist death-style of the self-affirming sovereign micro-fascist subject, but he most importantly proposes a number of welcome responses for living, to paraphrase Foucault, a micro-anti-fascist life. This book puts its readers on the path to such an art of living.” Gary Genosko, Professor of Communication and Digital Media Studies at Ontario Tech University in Oshawa, Canada
“On Microfascism provides crucial insight into the gendered dynamics and libidinal binds of everyday fascisms. In a devastating analysis of the necropolitical drive and militarized infatuations of fascist subjectivity, Bratich highlights the concerted authoritarian desire for the restoration and renewal of white supremacist heteropatriarchy. On Microfascism is a generative companion to such significant and varied studies as Ewa Majewska’s and Natasha Lennard’s writing on antifascist feminism and Klaus Theweleit’s classic analysis of the misogynistic psychopathologies of the German Freikorps.” Alyosha Goldstein, coeditor of For Antifascist Futures: Against the Violence of Imperial Crisis
“On Microfascism unpacks the deeply disturbing gender narratives that underskirt our societies and create an insurgent cruelty that corrodes our human relationships. This is an incredible intervention in the crisis we are living through and calls for us to collectively look deeper when responding to the growth of misogynist, white supremacist movements.” Shane Burley, author of Why We Fight: Essays on Fascism, Resistance, and Surviving the Apocalypse
“Jack Bratich has written a compelling and original discourse on how microfascism presents itself nowadays and how this is imbued with misogyny, the cult of death, and violence in many forms, war included. A must-read for all scholars and activists concerned with the historical, political, and social need to understand in time the real nature and the more or less weak signs of the emergent dimensions of this political phenomenon.” Leopoldina Fortunati, author of The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital
From the Book
Daryush “Roosh V” Valizadeh is an award-winning misogynist. It was perhaps too early (February) in a year (2014) that saw the rise of Gamergate and Milo Yiannapolis to dub him the “Web’s most infamous misogynist,” but he didn’t let his competitors take the spotlight so easily.
Roosh V is a self-made man. Not that he has cultivated an independent livelihood nor even lived the good neoliberal life by taking responsibility for his entrepreneurial self. Instead, and perhaps counter to the commonsensical notion of the self-made man, Roosh V’s life trajectory in the 2010s encapsulates a microfascist masculinity, or what I am calling autogenetic sovereignty.
Roosh V rose to prominence as an early pick-up artist (PUA) with a global orientation and a series of sex tourism books on how to get laid in different nations. This could be seen as microfascist performance art, since it was unlike any modern, plebian variation of dating con-artistry but, like his website, Return of Kings, heralded his self-ordained royal lineage. The newness of what he dubbed “neomasculinity” resulted from rummaging through the past (reactionary Christianity, ideological evolutionary biology, and Stoic philosophy) to find “old ways of helping men” restore a lost patriarchal order. His mission: to renew and spread a monarchical masculinity.
Like any good traditional hero Roosh V has faced some existential ordeals, which in his case could all be conveyed in one word: women. His entire PUA project is founded on the notion that female consent is a “barrier to be surpassed or sidestepped.” Roosh V needed women as an obstacle to overcome and renew the sovereignty he always innately had anyway. Feminists were especially an obstacle, as they were the “reason that the ‘masculine man’ has apparently disappeared from the world.” His response to this crisis, a blog post titled “How to Turn a Feminist Into your Sex Slave,” was to remind everyone of his sovereign power by reasserting mastery over them.
Despite being a self-made man, Valizadeh relied on women as objects to blame and instruments to renew his status. Valizadeh’s rallying cry was that “women forced him to act in a certain manner.” Men were sovereigns but under constant threat. Feminists in particular were so perniciously clever that he even blamed them for misogynistic killings, calling Elliot Rodger “the First Feminist Mass Murderer.” Classicist Donna Zuckerberg has pointed out that, for all Valizadeh’s claimed affiliation with Stoicism, “it is difficult to imagine a less Stoic pastime than ridiculing and attacking feminist writers for their ideas and physical appearances.” The self-made man, always on the brink of losing his subjective kingdom, must remake himself. This is done again and again through the reduction of women.
Valizadeh’s sovereign acts include edicts to: repeal women’s suffrage and for men to pass pro-men laws; redefine rape according to his own standards (“All Public Rape Allegations Are False”); and revive more traditional forms of the sexual traffic in women (by giving men absolute control over their female kin). Perhaps tired of providing so much nuance in his proclamations, he issued a blog-decree in language even non-sovereigns could understand: “Women Must Have Their Behavior and Decisions Controlled by Men.”
Sovereigns have often found themselves under attack, needing safe spaces like forts and castles. In 2016, Valizadeh faced his own grand battle, as his valiant attempt to hold court off the Internet was ruined by the threats of marauding hordes of women. Valizadeh had issued a call for nationwide in-real-life meetups for the many kings and kinglets in training. After hearing that women were going to show up with the intent of disrupting these men’s assemblies and squad roundtables, he canceled the event, declaring that he had been victimized by feminist harassment. His claim of victimhood only fueled his royal renewal project since it’s embedded in “the dynamic of masculine injury and capacity—the injury is that masculinity has been lost, and the role of popular misogyny is to find and restore it.”The king never fully arrives—his “return” is a renewal of capacities at the expense of women’s capacities, via the further injuries visited upon them.
However, at least one woman provides something other than epic ordeals for Roosh V: his mother. The self-made Roosh-man makes himself thanks to the supportive infrastructure of his mom. His version of MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) involves going his own way down the stairs to his mother’s basement. His man cave—in good necrophilic fashion—is a simulated womb, now filled with things hostile to the bearer of its predecessor.
The self-made man is obviously impossible. Moreover, it is a redundant phrase. Valizadeh embodies—in a distorted simulated way—what I’m calling autogenetic sovereignty. This might seem like a more convoluted way of saying self-made man and to some degree that is correct. But the “self-made man” phrase has a contemporary sociological connotation that limits its explanatory power. “Self-making” goes much deeper into the history of social power than the modern entrepreneur or success story can convey. And it has to do with the long history of microfascism.
Autogenetic sovereignty harkens back to an idea that a subject can create itself ex nihilo, disconnected from material connections and contexts. This very separation, as well see, is part of a long-standing patriarchal form of masculinity that distinguishes itself from women, turns to abstraction, and grounds itself in its own fabulations all at once.
Masculinity as such, traced through notions of sovereignty, is defined by autogenesis, a sovereign act of power to define and create oneself. The self-made sovereign is the primary sovereign act. The phrase “self-made man” is thus redundant, as to be a man is already to have the claimed power to make itself. This is key to our understanding of microfascism as autogenetic sovereignty only exists as a process of renewal (rebirth) and elimination (of women).
Roosh might be an exemplar but it’s the regularity and norm of masculine subjectivity that is under investigation here. Why are self-made men so adamant about their separation? Why do they incessantly have to assert sovereignty rather than just be sovereigns? Why does the repeated recreation of sovereignty depend so much on managing others, and more specifically, on depleting the capacities of others?
Republican on House select committee, however, refuses to say whether Trump should be referred for criminal charges
A key Republican on the House January 6 committee disputed a report which said the panel was split over whether to refer Donald Trump to the Department of Justice for criminal charges regarding his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, leading to the Capitol attack.
“There’s not really a dispute on the committee,” the Wyoming representative Liz Cheney told CNN’s State of the Union.
Alexander Dugin, 2019.
Alexander Dugin is quite possibly, after Steve Bannon, the most influential fascist in the world today. His TV station reaches over 20 million people, and the dozens of think tanks, journals and websites run by him and his employees ultimately have an even further reach. You, dear Counterpunch reader, will almost certainly have read pieces originally emanating from one of his outlets.
His strategy is that of the ‘red-brown alliance’ – an attempt to unite the far left and far-right under the hegemonic leadership of the latter. On the face of it, much of his programme can at first appear superficially attractive to leftists – opposition to US supremacy; support for a ‘multipolar’ world; and even an apparent respect for non-western and pre-colonial societies and traditions. In fact, such positions – necessary as they may be for a genuine leftist programme – are neither bad nor good in and of themselves; rather, they are means, tools for the creation of a new world. And the world Dugin wishes to create is one of the racially-purified ethno-states, dominated by a Euro-Russian white power aristocracy (the ‘Moscow-Berlin axis’) in which Asia is subordinated to Russia by means of a dismembered China. This is not an anti-imperialist programme. It is a programme for an inter-imperialist challenge for the control of Europe and Asia: for a reconstituted Third Reich.
The post Alexander Dugin and Fascism on the Left appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
“The worst disease is the treatment of the Negro. Everyone who freshly learns of this state of affairs at a mature age feels not only the injustice, but the scorn of the principle of the Fathers who founded the United States that ‘all men are created equal.’ [I could] hardly believe that a reasonable man can cling so tenaciously to such prejudice.”
— Albert Einstein in 1946 (Quoted, Wilkerson, 377)
Jurors on Friday freed two of the four defendants in the Michigan militia kidnapping-plot trial, but after a week of deliberations remained hung on the charges against the two men accused of being ringleaders in the conspiracy to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer. A mistrial was declared in the case of the latter two—Adam Fox, 37, of Grand Rapids; Barry Croft, 44, of Bear, Delaware—and they will remain in custody.
However, the jury found both Daniel Harris, 23, of Lake Orion, and Brandon Caserta, 32, of Canton, Michigan, not guilty on all charges, and they were released. The verdicts were announced after jurors told the judge that morning they were unable to reach a unanimous verdict on all counts, and he had sent them back to attempt one last time to reach finality.
“After using the suggestions of the court, we’re still unable to reach a unanimous decision on several counts,” a note from the jury handed to U.S. District Judge Robert Jonker three hours later said.
“On a case that has a lot of evidence … It is not unusual for a jury to come back and say, ‘Hey, we tried, but we just can’t get there at everything,'” Jonker had said earlier. “I know you’ve been at it a while … I’m not quite ready to say, ‘That’s the best we can do.'”