Fascism, Liberalism, and Democracy in the American Case

Catalog description

This course unpacks the highly contested meanings and uses of these three key words, which are at once theoretical concepts, political tropes, and partisan weapons. One key goal is to interpret the causes and language of Donald Trump's presidencies, and the motivations, appeal, and implications of the broader MAGA movement. That means assessing their story that elite "liberalism" is "stealing democracy," so that rule by "the people" needs to be saved from its enemies by an insurrection recovering 1776. A second key goal is assessing political theories that cast Trump and MAGA as a form of "fascism" internal to American history, and indeed "inside our heads" as Foucault put it. That means taking seriously a different critique of liberal democracy, as a civic nationalism entailing racial and sexual domination, elite rule, and a planet-destroying political economy. What then is "liberalism"? How has "democracy" been entangled with domination? In turn, a third key goal is discerning an emergent alternative, who is building it, and how. Which aspects of American political traditions and practices must be abandoned, which should be saved or reconstructed? What practices and solidarities must be newly created and from what other sources? Can a future be conjured that appeals to the many drawn to invented pasts? These questions pose the daunting problem of democratic persuasion in an intensely polarized culture. Authors may include: Karl Polanyi, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Klaus Theweleit, William Connolly, Octavia Butler, Naomi Klein.