Martin Wolf Knows That Capitalism Is in Crisis, but He Can’t Explain Why

Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator for the Financial Times, recognizes that the neoliberal model he once celebrated is in deep crisis. But Wolf can’t get to the heart of the problems with contemporary capitalism or offer a meaningful solution for them.

Martin Wolf, associate editor and chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, speaking in Washington, DC

(Andrew Harrer / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

BY GEORGE KEREVAN

04.15.2023

Jacobin 

Review of The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism by Martin Wolf (Penguin Random House, 2023).

The front cover of Martin Wolf’s new book, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, is emblazoned with a red flying wedge straight out of an early Soviet-era constructivist poster. However, the book’s author is more interested in saving capitalism than burying it.

Wolf, the chief commentator of the Financial Times on economics, is arguably one of the most influential media defenders of the neoliberal order, and certainly the most nuanced. He sets out his case in an intellectual doorstop — nearly five hundred pages long — of the kind made popular by Thomas Piketty.

Yet verbosity is not always proof of a sound argument, and that proves to be the case here. Wolf is a brilliant journalist and commentator, but his attempt at outlining a blueprint for a Neoliberalism 2.0 gets lost in its own labyrinthine contradictions.

Fruits of Neoliberalism

To give Wolf his due, he knows something has gone very wrong with the global order. Instead of delivering “prosperity and steady progress,” the democratic capitalism he defends has generated “soaring inequality, dead-end jobs, and macroeconomic instability.”

As someone whose Jewish parents barely escaped the Holocaust, with many family members who did not, Wolf is genuinely worried that this economic failure may be fermenting a dangerous populist reaction against liberal democracy:

People expect the economy to deliver reasonable levels of prosperity and opportunity to themselves and their children. When it does not . . . they become frustrated and resentful. . . . Predictably, they frequently blame this disappointment on outsiders — minorities at home and foreigners.

As a good liberal, Wolf spends time undermining many of the standard populist tropes, deploying a mass of empirical data. Although this aspect of the book sometimes offers more quantity than quality, he does see off the Trumpian–Brexiteer lie that immigration is the principal destroyer of Western blue-collar jobs.Martin Wolf’s attempt at outlining a blueprint for a Neoliberalism 2.0 gets lost in its own labyrinthine contradictions.

Wolf shows that there is in fact scant evidence of immigrants reducing wage levels — largely because they play the role of complements rather than substitutes in metropolitan labor markets. Studies also indicate that the net fiscal contribution of immigrants tends to be positive because they come to find work.

Wolf is willing to countenance the possibility that mass immigration, when confined to already densely populated areas, can produce “congestion costs.” However, the reality is that the decay of urban centers in the United States and UK has nothing to do with mass immigration and everything to do with the flight of the middle class to the suburbs. The resulting contraction of the local fiscal base leads to the underfunding of education and infrastructure.

Populism and Class Power

There is a clue here to the weakness in Wolf’s overall thesis. Basically, he is blaming the threat to liberal democracy jointly on the rage of the dispossessed traditional working class and on the ideological “wokeism” of young professionals whose standard of living has flatlined in the era after the 2008 financial crisis.

According to Wolf, enraged blue-collar workers have turned to Donald Trump and Nigel Farage while the naive youth have turned to Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. Both sides are united in wanting to see off liberal democracy and free trade in favor of demagogic nationalism, authoritarianism, and economic protectionism. To save the liberal order, he argues, we need to reinvigorate democratic institutions and reboot economic growth, giving everyone a share in the capitalist pie.If the system failed to deliver, which it did, that was the result of conscious choices by the ruling elite.

Yet instead of blaming the old working class for their political stupidity — which is actually what Wolf is implying — or the youth for their left-wing naivety, we need to restore class and class power as the key component of the present crisis. This, of course, is the ingredient that is absent from Wolf’s approach.

The missing actors in Wolf’s worldview are the strata of middle-class professionals in Western society who have appropriated the massive economic gains generated in the globalist expansion of the period between roughly 1990 to 2008. These are the beneficiaries of neoliberalism and its intellectual exponents, of whom Martin Wolf is ideologue in chief. If the system failed to deliver, which it did, that was the result of conscious choices by the ruling elite.

Winners and Losers

Globalization has profoundly altered the structure and nature of this Western ruling elite. The process has resulted in a massive excess of surplus value beyond what can be productively invested and valorized. This excess has underwritten the emergence of a superlayer of unnecessary functionaries, pseudomanagers, financial-service employees, influencers, academic ideologues, luxury-consumption providers, and pampered cultural workers.

The members of this layer are collectively referred to as the New Petty Bourgeois (following Nicos Poulantzas) or the New Professional Middle Class. At one end (for example, computer programmers and IT engineers), this social layer clearly merges into the scientific proletariat. At the upper end, however, among financial executives, hedge fund managers, and so on, it is clearly bourgeois.Wolf’s analysis lacks the deeper sociopolitical apparatus required to explain the rise and emergent crisis of the Western neoliberal order.

In the mass, this parasitical group has all the unstable characteristics of any middle social layer: individualistic, narcissistic, and politically vacillating. Its direct interests lie with maintaining the neoliberal order.

Unfortunately, Wolf’s analysis lacks the deeper sociopolitical apparatus required to explain the rise and emergent crisis of the Western neoliberal order, particularly the power structure and vested interests that sustain it. He substitutes a rather long-in-the-tooth Anglo-Saxon empiricism for his lack of theory. But his facts end up marooned.

Rentier Capitalism

For instance, Wolf happily quotes a McKinsey Global Institute report, which shows that between 2005 and 2008, around 70 percent of all households in the high-income economies had a flat or falling real income (before any redistribution through state transfers). In other words, the neoliberal order at its height produced zero improvement for most people’s lives. On the other hand, the share of pre-tax national income going to the top 10 percent of the population in America increased by a whole nine percentage points between 1981 and 2008, to a staggering 44 percent of the total.

This is, of course, devastating evidence of a rapacious Western elite strata plundering the gains of technology and free trade to amass wealth on a scale not seen in previous capitalist cycles. But Wolf is more concerned — threatened perhaps? — by the populist, plebeian reaction to this development than he is interested in pursuing an investigation of its cause.The neoliberal order at its height produced zero improvement for most people’s lives.

True, he devotes a chapter to the rise of what he calls “rentier capitalism.” Wolf explains that rising global savings have combined with the concentration in incomes to produce a glut of cash seeking risky investment outlets in the financial sector. As Wolf ruefully notes:

This explosion of financial activity has not done much for productivity growth . . . much of the most highly rewarded activity of the sector consists of what are likely to be . . . zero-sum activities: hedging against volatility created by financial activity itself; invention of complex derivatives that conceal embedded risks; and outright gambling.

He concludes by arguing that the financial sector “wastes both human and real resources” and is “in large part a rent-extraction machine.” Karl Marx could not have put it so succinctly (and Wolf is fond of quoting Marx and even Leon Trotsky).

At no point, however, does Wolf suggest that this parasitical financial edifice has directly given rise to vested interests that are determined to ensure their own survival and that of the system itself, no matter how dysfunctional. Indeed, after the recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), Wolf could still write disingenuously in the Financial Times that it “may be amusing that those shrieking for a rescue this time have been the libertarians of Silicon Valley.” Yet he backed the extension of US deposit insurance to every SVB depositor, no matter how large. The system protects itself.

Myths of Free Trade

This myopia leaves Wolf in the position of implicitly criticizing anyone who opposes the system. He sees no future in “populist” economics that eschew free trade and free movement of capital and spends a lot of time bashing Trump’s protectionism, suggesting it will lead the US toward a sort of Latin American–style banana republic.

If that is the case, then why has Joe Biden kept most of the Trump-era prohibitions on trade with China and even extended them? Why has a supposedly orthodox American president introduced the biggest peacetime industrial subsidies, in a bid to repatriate offshore microprocessor production back to the continental United States? Could it possibly be that the high-tech liberals who fund the Democratic Party are just as interested in protecting their markets and supply chains as a folksy populist? (And that includes those SVB depositors.)Wolf’s section on ‘what went wrong’ is devoid of any reference to the bank-saving austerity policies which fell most heavily on the poor.

The problem with Wolf’s vision of Liberal Goodies and Populist Baddies is laid bare when it comes to the role that government austerity policies since 2008 have played in depressing living standards and household incomes. Indeed, you can search in vain through Wolf’s voluminous index for the very word “austerity.”

His section on “what went wrong” is devoid of any reference to the bank-saving austerity policies which fell most heavily on the poor. Nor does he mention the quantitative easing by central banks which effectively printed money to subsidize shareholder wealth. The loss of prosperity — or even hope for prosperity — that Wolf blames for the rise of authoritarian populism was no accident. It was the result of austerity and quantitative easing policies that were employed after 2008 to cope with the aftermath of the speculative bubble.

Busking While Rome Burns

Since he avoids discussing the class causes of the failure of neoliberalism, making populism a scapegoat instead, we should not be surprised that Wolf’s solutions to the “crisis of democratic capitalism” are misdirected as well as banal. In fact, he spends rather more effort on criticizing left or leftish solutions than in putting forward his own.

For example, he offers a long, ill-tempered critique of the notion of a universal basic income (UBI) as an antidote to poverty and social insecurity. According to Wolf, a UBI would be “inescapably wasteful” and “unaffordable” (unlike bank bailouts). At best, Wolf offers a reheated and half-hearted form of Keynesianism as a way to shore up aggregate demand, although he delivers some characteristic rants against Modern Monetary Theory or the idea of printing our way out of poverty.

Of course, none of this confronts the central weakness of a system based on endless capital accumulation: What do you do when you run out of ways to invest that return the average or better rate of profit? For Wolf, the word “planning” is anathema.Wolf spends rather more effort on criticizing left or leftish solutions than in putting forward his own.

When it comes to political reform, Wolf pays homage to the usual suspects like better civic education, devolution to local government, and rooting out corruption. He is on more interesting ground when he suggests replacing the present Western representative model with a hybrid electoral system.

According to Wolf, this would involve three chambers: a directly elected, freely contested legislature; an appointed chamber (“House of Merit”) that advises and has the power of delay, like the House of Lords in the UK; and a “House of the People” chosen by lot (like a jury) with a power of delay and the right to initiate binding, popular referendums on any subject. The idea would be to reduce the influence of special interests and revive popular engagement with politics.

Yet one can’t help thinking that Wolf is being disingenuous. The possibility of anything this complicated or radical being introduced anywhere is zero. He is busking intellectually because he has no real practical alternative to the present situation.

Out of Ideas

From Israel to Hungary and from the United States to the UK, populists are using voter-suppression tactics to strengthen their electoral position. Meanwhile, the ruling neoliberal elite is exploiting its media control, access to personal data, and lobbying power to make democracy a controlled game in which the political agenda and potential solutions are circumscribed to the “reality” of capitalism and its needs. Capitalist democracy has become a hollow shell while the populists are bent on knocking down the remnants.

Wolf is right to worry about the possible return of the jackboot and the concentration camp. But he cannot recognize that popular disenchantment with capitalist democracy will not be cured by introducing more such democracy, which will by definition exclude the interests of the mass of the population. If we are going to think the unthinkable, then we should remember that we now possess the social media tools to revive the stalled Marxist project of abolishing the state itself and introducing direct democracy.Capitalist democracy has become a hollow shell while the populists are bent on knocking down the remnants.

In his forgotten past, Wolf was a member of the youth section of the British Labour Party, the Labour Party Young Socialists, which was then under the influence of an assortment of Trotskyist groups. Today he dismisses the idea of “socialist democracy” as a chimera: “Such a combination of economic and political power will end up, sooner or later, like the Venezuela of Hugo Chávez and Nicolas Maduro.”

For Wolf, the only possible world system is the neoliberal model he has preached for and defended in the pages of the Financial Times. Twenty years ago, Wolf wrote a book entitled Why Globalization Works. This latest work is his mea culpa. But far from being an intellectual tour de force, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism reveals that Martin Wolf has run out of ideas.

CONTRIBUTOR
George Kerevan is a former member of the British parliament who served on its oversight committee for banking and bank regulation. He is on the board of the Scottish antiestablishment website CONTER.

Chomsky and Me: an Interview With Bev Boisseau Stohl

BY JOHN KENDALL HAWKINSFacebook

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Photograph Source: Hans Peters / Anefo – Creative Commons Zero, Public Domain Dedication

Bev Stohl ran the MIT office of the renowned linguist and social critic Noam Chomsky for nearly two and a half decades. This is her account of those years, working next to a man described by the New York Times as “arguably the most important intellectual alive today.” 

Stohl’s memoir, Chomsky and Me [OR Books, 2023] is casually anti-intellectual – not out to Tell All about the inner workings of Noam’s genius — and intentionally sets out, through anecdotes and descriptions of their everyday doings at the office, and on overseas trips, to present human beings at work in activities they hope will make the world a little by their doings. There is no hero worship, but solid, honest observations of a lifestyle nestled in the embrace of integrity and care.

Hawkins: A memoir is often fraught with difficult writerly choices — what to put in and what to leave out. Chomsky and Me is both protective of Chomsky and illuminating about you. What was your motivation for writing this memoir? And what are some of the choices you had to make?

Stohl: A memoir, like any book, can be written a million different ways. It feels to me that I wrote seven hundred versions of Chomsky & Me, asking myself in each chapter and each paragraph, in each iteration, is this the story I want to tell? Is this the most important detail? My motivation for writing this memoir was simple. I see the world through a writer’s lens, so within months of taking the job as Chomsky’s assistant I saw what was going on in our office, what kind of man he was, what types of people met with him or invited him to lecture. I noticed small quirks about his work style, and larger characteristics of his personality, his interaction with all kinds of visitors, talk organizers, colleagues, students, staff.  I worried that the details of our daily lives might be lost, so I assigned myself to be note keeper, writing pages of essays and scribbling on sticky note pads.

In 2012, after traveling with Noam and my partner Laura to Pavia, Italy, I began posting stories on my blog, “Bev Stohl’s Stata Confusion”. An unintended outcome of this was the comments from activists telling me that seeing Noam as a human being rather than the deity many worshipped—a man who spent time with family, friends, in his garden or on the pond—gave them permission to bring more balance to their own lives. I made an intentional choice to shine the light on the human side of Noam and others like him, because activists are historically plagued by burnout. The blog eventually grew into a book. I wanted to title it, Chomsky and Me: Our World Through Progressive Lenses, but the publisher nixed it.

I wrote about how he handled adversity, and welcomed diversity, and my joy at the sense of playfulness and humanity he shared with me, and with his linguistics and social justice contemporaries. I noticed their ability to move from dark to light, from hopelessness to hope, in looping cycles. This was something I hadn’t seen as much in other MIT departments.

I continued to write, edit and re-edit as I developed a wider scope of understanding, and over a decade the focus of my writing changed and refocused. It took years to pare down my writings and find the most salient stories. So many were left out – Kathleen Cleaver’s work with the Black Panthers, how Noam was affected by the poor people knocking on his parent’s door selling rags. Deleting 14,000 words from my final transcript felt like killing off my best friends, but as I took out more personal facts, I saw the emergence of the story I wanted to tell. And my friends are safely tucked away for another story.

Laura, Noam and Bev backstage after a talk at Harvard.

Hawkins:  Chomsky has put out to the world over the years that the three main crises humanity should be worried about at this stage are Climate Change, Nukes, and the end of Democracy — all interconnected. Would you agree with this? What might you add?

Stohl: I do agree, but I would also add that there’s a loss of human connection. Noam and I are the kinds of people who talk to strangers on elevators.  Kindness, empathy, and connection, all characteristics of our office atmosphere… aren’t these at the core of everything that offers hope in the world? The atmosphere grew organically, no only because of who we were individually, and who we were together, but because of the people whose energy filled our suite. If these were the predominant principles of life, we wouldn’t have any of the other greed-driven issues. Democracy and truth would be a natural state, and the word “gaslighting” wouldn’t be so much a part of the public dialogue.

Hawkins: How did your Catholicism and Noam’s Jewishness meld?  Catholics often aim for forgiveness and preparation, while persistence seems fairly characteristic of the Jewish worldview.  Your description to Noam of The Act of Contrition was funny and quaint. How did your differences in approaches play out in your relationship with Noam? And who would single out in the public for needing an act of contrition?

Stohl: One of the things Noam and I disagreed on was which was worse, his mother’s infliction of Jewish guilt or my mother’s infliction of Catholic guilt. We dueled back and forth, upping the ante with each story. In the end we called it a draw. To answer your question, Noam is quite persistent and I can be as well, so we were a match there, although his persistence far outweighed mine. I was more likely to take a break for a walk, where he had to be reminded to take care of himself, then re-reminded, then forced. We were, though, a hopeless pair when it came to being too compassionate and letting people in who maybe should have been more closely vetted. Carol Chomsky once became frustrated with us, insisting that a duck could get an appointment with Noam. We countered that we took people at their word when they asked for an appointment. Catholics aim at preparation? I more fly by the seat of my pants, so this doesn’t fit me. Of course we both had to prepare for his trips, our visitors, his local lectures, but I’m not sure that’s a religious thing as much as a survival necessity. Or are you talking about preparation for the afterlife? Religion wasn’t a leading issue at MIT, so there wasn’t a lot of discussion. I did have a strange experience after my mother died, which I hesitated to put in the book for fear people would find me an untrustworthy narrator. Noam had a moving experience in a Colombian forest dedicated to his late wife, Carol, and I think comparing those two experiences was the only time we talked for more than ten seconds about spirituality.

Who would I single out for contrition? I could say the obvious, He Who Shall Not Be Named. I won’t give credence to the person who gave hateful people permission to spout venom and dedicate themselves to shredding hope for a democratic world.

Hawkins: Can you tell how you came to work for Chomsky and what a typical day in his office was like?

Stohl: I applied at the last minute for a different job, as student administrator, but it was offered to someone else hours before my application arrived. The head administrator knew me, and thought I might fit with Noam, whose previous assistant had burned out and quit within a year. I didn’t conceal to anyone during the interview process that Noam had been approached by a news crew a year before to interview me about my “backward talking ability.” My plan was to work at a less complicated job so I could work on a psychology master’s degree, so I took the job when it was offered, thinking I’d be out within a few years. Thinking it would be easy.

On a typical day, Noam came in around ten, after my assistant and I had gone through a few hundred emails, sorting through and answering when appropriate, tacking on notes to the many we’d pass onto Noam. Three days a week his schedule, which I arranged months in advance, was filled with appointments with students, researchers, activists in a thousand domains, faculty, political hopefuls, supporters, detractors, and on and on. Meanwhile more emails arrived asking him to teach a class, give a lecture, host a Q&A, or write statements of support for endless groups, and people showed up unannounced for a handshake, an autograph, or a photo in front of the Bertrand Russell poster. We tried to fit in a ten-minute meeting of our own, and on a good day, we witnessed people looking more empowered, we had some laughs, we felt a little more hope. On a good day we were able to check in about ourselves, maybe take a walk to the farmer’s market. On a fun day, my dog Roxy, dubbed “the cat” by Noam, who appreciated her as our comic relief, tried to steal his lunch, or I was surprised by well-known personalities walking through our door, exposing themselves as mortal human beings. On an interesting day Noam and I argued over the definition of “courage”, whether we could count our thoughts, or whether his black Velcro footwear were sneakers or shoes. The plates were always spinning, whether dealing with the now or the future. I think if you took any office situation and played it on fast forward, you would see us at work.

Hawkins: Chomsky and Me is filled with episodes of loss, for Noam and for you, yet is never hung up on ending, but rather continuing.  In the memoir you write:

Inside the church, the music lulled me into moments of solace, moving me away from the heart-felt pain I carried from the accumulated losses of my mother and Laura’s, and Sylvia and Danny. With Roxy sick, I needed this uplifting respite.

And, of course, Noam was dealing with the loss of his long-time wife Carol. In each case, both of you show courage in moving on.  Given the catastrophic problems facing humanity, what’s your secret to enduring tragic personal losses in a dilapidating world?

Stohl: I once asked Noam how he kept going, seeing what he saw, knowing what he knew. He said he had no choice but to keep moving forward. Action, even small acts of kindness, quelled anxiety for both of us. I think this was why we loved the atmosphere of our office. People feeling hopeful curiosity about how to fix things walked in eager and excited, and left more energized. That energy hung around, adding to the positive atmosphere. I think we both found respite in little things, little ones. Noam’s extended family, particularly the children, brought him joy, as did the kids and animals in my life. Worrying about the futures of these kids gave us the impetus to keep our revolving door spinning. To be completely honest, I am not always upbeat. The losses get to me, and sometimes I’m cranky. I try to pull myself out of it by “throwing things I love at the negativity.” Walking my dogs helps. Writing helps. Swimming helps. I don’t think a book entitled, “Chomsky and His Cranky Assistant” would sell.

Hawkins: For some of us who grew up in the activist 60s, it feels like everything we loved about the era is falling away, especially protests against The Man. I miss Abbie Hoffman and his street theater and levity more than ever.  That’s why I enjoyed reading about you and Chomsky laughing together over both simple and complex agendas. Noam called it “laughing through the tears,” you write. It was a way of acknowledging the absurdity of it all and of dealing with the grief. The current generation seems incoherent in its response to the chaos all around. How do you explain this? Did you ever talk about it with Noam?

Stohl: Without humor, we’re sunk. It’s that simple for me, and I suppose Noam also found it important. He certainly used humor a lot, although I wonder in retrospect whether he made it a point to be funny for my sake. Kind of a self-centered thought, but to some extent it may be true. I don’t tend to agree with you completely re the current generation. I think they’re split – many are more concerned with TikTok and how many “friends” liked their posts. I remember Noam was dumbfounded at the idea that these kids thought they had 300 friends, when in reality they might have two real friends. He thought it was delusional. On the other hand– I’m going to throw out “half” here, but I may be way off—half the current generation voted more heavily in recent elections than most. Many are going into the fields of environmental engineering and green technology, trying to clean up the mess before it’s too late. They blame the boomers who lost interest, but as we all know, that group is also split. Noam told me each time we had a big election that if people were as involved during the rest of the year as they were during elections, there might be some hope for real change.

Hawkins: Moving from Building 20 to the strange Stata complex was something. Noam getting lost.  Form imposing on function. The building you two were in looked like a meteor had punched it in the face.  Was MIT just messing with Noam’s head? And how come you adjusted so well? Are you messed up in the head?

Stohl: I don’t think MIT was messing with Noam’s head. In fact, I think they were honoring him with the best view in the building – a panorama of the Boston skyline. Although the slanted walls in his office were questionable; Noam had no idea where all of his books would go. But we worked it out. Nobody knew Frank Gehry’s building would fail in the ways that it did – leaking ceilings, crumbling amphitheater stairways. These issues had as much to do with construction as the building’s design. For most, the building did encourage more creativity than a typical boxy building. If Noam and I were messed up in the head, it wasn’t the building’s fault. I think looking at the truth 24-7 messed up his head, and mine by proximity. It may also be true that the Stata Center made craziness slightly more fun.

Hawkins: Can you say more about Noam’s relationship to Howard Zinn?  How are they aligned as a legacy couple? And what have we all lost in losing him?

Stohl: Noam and Howard had a lot in common, the most obvious link being their opposition of the Vietnam War, and hands-on involvement in and dedication to the anti-war movement in general, both social activists at every level. Noam said the creative gene, particularly the musical gene, skipped him completely, yet Howard was a talented playwright.  Noam told me years ago that he and Howard differed in a few ways, one being that Howard seemed to enjoy his political work, while Noam was an activist simply because the work had to be done. It was glaring when Howard died that Noam was the only one left of the Howard-Roz-Noam-Carol foursome.

Hawkins: You helped produce an animated film about Chomsky: “Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?” Can you say more about that project?

Stohl: It’s a stretch to say I helped produce it. I did encourage Noam to do it, and I provided support to Michel Gondry, the film’s producer. I set up each interview and phone conversation, and kept his 8mm film refrigerated for months in our office between visits. Gondry sent us several stills of the animation process, one of which is framed and hanging in my guest room at home. Michel made the process a blast. Each time he flew in from Paris for the next few hours of interviews, we crowded around his laptop, laughing and cheering as we watched their conversations transform magically, playfully into animated movement through Michel’s thousands of hand-drawn cells. Plus he used my dog, Roxy, to illustrate a few points about cognition. What’s not to love?

Hawkins: We will one day soon lose Chomsky, our Public Philosopher, at the same time AIs are coming on to help us do our thinking for us.  (And it all started with MIT’s interactive psychologist, Eliza!) Where do you see Chomsky’s greatest payment forward — linguistics, coherent thinking, politics, or something else?  And what will you leave behind?

Stohl: Any time I think of Noam’s work, I see him walking, sighing, and forging ahead from one issue, lecture, country, to the next. I often think about his dedication and contributions to the fields of linguistics, cognitive science, politics, psychology, philosophy, math, computer science, childhood education, and more, and I worry that he’ll leave us the way he left the office every June, after a year of endless hard work: doubtful that he’d done enough. I hope for a miracle to show itself at the eleventh hour, a positive nod in his direction so that his last breaths on this Earth won’t be sighs of discouragement. And you probably know he’s not a big fan of AI, at least not in terms of it acting as a substitute for human thinking.

What will I leave behind? I hope it matters that I’ve made people laugh, made them feel seen and heard, just as Noam did. I hope I made a difference in a few lives. In terms of Noam’s work, I hope my blog stories, interviews, podcasts, and my memoir, “Chomsky and Me” have successfully chronicled his legacy as the brilliant and caring human being that he is.

John Kendall Hawkins is an American ex-pat freelancer based in Australia.  He is a former reporter for The New Bedford Standard-Times.

More Than ‘Democracy’ is at Stake in Israeli Protests

BY RICHARD FALKFacebook

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Photograph Source: Oren Rozen – CC BY-SA 4.0

There are two interwoven conflicts currently playing out in Israel, but neither, despite the Western liberal spin, relates to the threatened demise of Israeli democracy. That concern presupposes that Israel had been a democracy until the recent wave of extremism arising from the new Netanyahu-led Israeli government’s commitment to ‘judicial reform.’ A euphemism hid the purpose of such an undertaking, which was to limit judicial independence by endowing the Knesset with the powers to impose the will of a parliamentary majority to override court decisions by a simple majority and exercise greater control over the appointment of judges. Certainly, these were moves toward institutionalizing a tighter autocracy in Israel as it would modify some semblance of separation of powers, but not a nullification of democracy as best expressed by guaranteeing the equal rights of all citizens regardless of their ethnicity or religious persuasion.

To be a Jewish State that confers by its own Basic Law of 2018 an exclusive right of self-determination exclusively on the Jewish people and asserts supremacy at the expense of the Palestinian minority of more than 1.7 million persons undermines Israel’s claim to be a democracy, at least with reference to the citizenry as a whole. As well, Palestinians have long endured discriminatory laws and practices on fundamental issues that over time have come to have its government process widely identified as an apartheid regime that is operative in both the Occupied Palestine Territories and Israel itself. If language is stretched to its limits, it is possible to regard Israel as an ethnic-democracy or theocratic democracy, but such terms are vivid illustrations of political oxymorons.

Since its establishment as a state in 1948, Israel has denied equal rights to its Palestinian minority. It has even disallowed any right of return to the 750,000 Palestinians who were coerced to leave during the 1947 War, and are entitled by international law to return home, at least after combat has ceased. The current bitter fight between religious and secular Jews centering on the independence of Israel’s judiciary is from most Palestinian points of view an intramural squabble, as Israel’s highest courts through the years have overwhelmingly supported the most internationally controversial moves ‘unlawfully’ restricting Palestinians, including the establishment of settlements, denial of right of return, separation wall, collective punishment, the annexation of East Jerusalem, house demolitions, and prisoner abuse.

On a few occasions, most notably with respect to reliance on torture techniques used against Palestinian prisoners, the judiciary has shown slight glimmers of hope that it might address Palestinian grievance in a balanced manner, but after more than 75 years of Israel’s existence and 56 years of its occupation of Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, this hope has effectively vanished.

Nevertheless, Israel’s control of the political narrative that shaped public opinion allowed the country be to be legitimized, even celebrated by hyperbolic rhetoric as ‘the only democracy in the Middle East,’ and as such, the one country in the Middle East with whom North America and Europe shared values alongside interests. In essence, Biden reaffirmed this canard in the text of the Jerusalem Declaration jointly signed with Yair Lapid, the Prime Minister at the time, during the American president’s state visit last August. In its opening paragraph, these sentiments are expressed: “The United States and Israel share is an unwavering commitment to democracy…”

In the years before Israel’s election last November resulted in a coalition government regarded as the most right-wing in the country’s history, the U.S. government and diaspora Jewry have been at pains to ignore the devastating civil society consensus that Israel was guilty of inflicting an apartheid regime to maintain its ethnic dominance was subjugating and exploited Palestinians living in Occupied Palestine and Israel. Apartheid is outlawed by international human rights law, and treated in international law as a crime with a severity second only to genocide. Notable opponents of the extreme racism of South Africa, including Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and John Dugard have each commented that Israeli apartheid treats Palestinians worse than the cruelties that South Africa inflicted on their African majority population, which was condemned at the UN and throughout the world as internationally intolerable racism. Allegations of Israeli apartheid have been documented in a series of authoritative reports: UN Economic and Social Commission for West Asia (2017), Human Rights Watch (2021), B’Tselem (2021), and Amnesty International (2022). Despite these condemnations, the U.S. Government and liberal pro-Israel NGOs have avoided even the mention of the apartheid dimension of the Israeli state, not daring to open the issue for debate by refuting the allegations. As Dugard pointed out when asked what was the greatest difference between fighting apartheid in South Africa and Israel, he responded: “..the weaponization of antisemitism.” This has been borne out in my own experience. There was opposition to anti-apartheid militancy with respect to South Africa but never the attempt to brand the militants as themselves wrongdoers, even ‘criminals.’

From these perspectives, what is at stake in the protests, is whether Israel is to be treated as an illiberal democracy of the sort fashioned in Hungary by Viktor Orban, diluting the quality of the procedural democracy that had been operative for Israeli Jews since 1948. The new turn in Israel gestures toward the kind of majoritarian rule that has prevailed for the last decade in Turkey, involving a slide toward an outright intra-Jewish autocracy. Yet we should note that in neither Hungary nor Turkey have governance structures of an apartheid character emerged, although both countries have serious issues involving discrimination against minorities. Turkey has for decades has rejected demands from its Kurdish minority for equal rights and separate statehood, or at least a strong version of autonomy. These instances of encroachment on basic human rights at least have not occurred within a framework of settler colonialism that in Israel has made Palestinians strangers, virtual aliens, in their own homeland where they have resided for centuries. Racism is not the only reason to dissent from the democracy-in-jeopardy discourse, dispossession may be the more consequential one. If native people were to be asked whether they worried about the erosion or even the abandonment of democracy in such settler colonial ‘success stories’ as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S. the question itself would have no current existential relevance to their lives. Native peoples were never meant to be included in the democratic mandate that these encroaching national cultures adopted so proudly. Their tragic fate was sealed as soon as the colonial settlers arrived. It was in each instance one of marginalization, dispossession, and suppression. This indigenous struggle for ‘bare survival’ as distinct peoples with viable culture and ways of life of their own making. Its destruction amounts to what Lawrence Davidson has called ‘cultural genocide” in his pathbreaking book of 2012, which even then included a chapter condemning Israel’s treatment of Palestinian society.

Underneath the encounter among Israeli Jews, which allegedly discloses a chasm so deep as to threaten civil war in Israel lies the future of the settler colonial project in Israel. As those that have studied ethnic dispossession in other settler colonial contexts have concluded, unless the settlers manage to stabilize their own supremacy and limit international solidarity initiatives, they will eventually lose control as happened in South Africa and Algeria under very different schemes of settler domination. It is this sense that the Israel protests going on need to be interpreted as a double confrontation. What is explicitly at stake is a bitter encounter between secular and ultra-religious Jews the outcome of which is relevant to what the Palestinians can expect to be their fate going forward. There is also the implicit stake between those who favor maintaining the existing apartheid arrangements resting on discriminatory control but without necessarily insisting on territorial and demographic adjustments and those who are intent on using violent means to extinguish the Palestinian ‘presence’ as any sort of impediment to the further purification of the Jewish state as incorporating the West Bank, and finally fulfilling the vision of Israel as coterminous with the whole of the ‘the promised land’ asserted as a biblical entitlement of Jews as interpreted by way of a Zionist optic.

It is a mystery where Netanyahu, the pragmatic extremist, stands, and perhaps he has yet to make up his mind. Thomas Friedman, the most reliable weathervane of liberal Zionism weighs in with the claim that Netanyahu for the first time in his long political career has become an ‘irrational’ leader that is no longer trustworthy from the perspective of Washington because his tolerance of Jewish extremism is putting at risk the vital relationship with the U.S. and discrediting the illusion of reaching a peaceful resolution of the conflict by of diplomacy and the two-state solution. Such tenets of a liberal approach have long been rendered obsolete by Israeli settlements and land grabs beyond the 1948 green line.

Politically, Netanyahu needed the support of Religious Zionism to regain power and obtain support for judicial reform to evade being potentially held personally accountable for fraud, corruption, and the betrayal of the public trust. Yet ideologically, I suspect Netanyahu is not as uncomfortable with the scenario favored by the likes of Itamar Ben-Gvir and Benezel Smotrich as he pretends. It allows him to shift blame for dirty deeds in dealing with the Palestinians. To avoid the dreaded South African outcome, Netanyahu seems unlikely to oppose another final round of dispossession and marginalization of the Palestinians while Israel completed a maximal version of the Zionist Project. For now, Netanyahu seems to be riding both horses, playing a moderating role with respect to the Jewish fight about judicial reform, while winking slyly at those who make no secret of their resolve to induce a second nakba (in Arabic, ‘catastrophe’), a term applied specifically to the 1948 expulsion. For many Palestinians, the nakba is experienced as an ongoing process rather than an event limited by time and place with highs and lows.

My guess is that Netanyahu, himself an extremist when addressing Israelis in Hebrew, has still not decided whether he can continue to ride both horses or must soon choose which to ride. Having appointed Ben-Gvir and Smotrich to key positions vesting control over Palestinians and as the chief regulators of settler violence it is pure mystification to consider Netanyahu as going through a political midlife crisis or finding himself a captive of his coalition partners. What he is doing is letting it happen, blaming the religious right for excesses, but not unhappy with their tactics of seeking a victorious end of the Zionist Project.

Liberal Zionists should be deeply concerned about the degree to which these developments in Israel give rise to a new wave of real antisemitism, which is the opposite of the weaponized kind that Israel and its supporters around the world have been using as state propaganda against critics of state policies and practices. These targeted critics of Israel have no hostility whatsoever to Jews as a people and feel respectful toward Judaism as a great world religion. Rather than respond substantively to criticisms of its behavior, Israel has for more than a decade deflected discussion of its wrongdoing by pointing a finger at its critics and some institutions, especially the UN and International Criminal Court, where allegations of Israeli racism and criminality have been made on the basis of evidence and scrupulous adherence to existing standards of the rule of law. Such an approach, emphasizing the implementation of international law, contrasts with the irresponsible Israeli evasions of substantive allegations by leveling attacks on critics rather than either complying with the applicable norms or engaging substantively by insisting that their practices toward the Palestinian people are reasonable in light of legitimate security concerns, which was the principal tactic during the first decades of their existence.

In this sense, the recent events in Israel are dangerously portraying Jews as racist criminals in their behavior toward subjugated Palestinians, done with the blessings of the government. The unpunished settler violence toward Palestinian communities has even been affirmed by relevant government officials as in the deliberate destruction of the small village of Huwara (near Nablus). A photo-recorded aftermath of settlers dancing in celebration amid the village ruins is surely a kind of Kristallnacht, which of course is not meant to minimize the horrors of Nazi genocide, but unfortunately invites comparisons and disturbing questions. How can Jews act so violently against vulnerable native people living amongst them, yet denied basic rights? And will not this kind of grotesque spectacle perversely motivate neo-Nazi groups to castigate Jews? In effect, Israel by both cheapens the real menace of antisemitism in this process of attaching the label where it doesn’t belong and at the same time arouses hatred of Jews by documented renditions of their inhuman behavior toward a people forcibly estranged from their native land. By so acting, Israel is making itself vulnerable in a manner potentially damaging to Jews everywhere, which is an inevitable global spillover from this inflammatory campaign of the Netanyahu government to victimize even more acutely the Palestinian people, aimed at their total submission, or better their departure.

Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, Chair of Global law, Queen Mary University London, and Research Associate, Orfalea Center of Global Studies, UCSB.

The New Hate: Transphobia Rising in the Wake of  Nashville

BY ANTHONY DIMAGGIO

 APRIL 14, 2023
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Trans wall art, Portland. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

The Nashville mass shooting by the 28-year-old Audrey Hale has been seized upon by the reactionary right to intensify the campaign of hate against the trans community. Even as her motives were unknown and pending an investigation, rightwing officials and pundits pounced, blaming the shooting on trans-identity politics. This outcome is unsurprising for a party that treats hate as a family value.

The attempt to link trans identity to violence is part of a larger effort on the right to identify new targets in the culture wars, serving up fresh meat to a GOP base that’s long idealized racism, heterosexism, classism, and other forms of prejudice. There’s a bait and switch at work here, with rightwing officials and pundits designating trans people as the new public enemy number one. This shift springs from the political reality that bigotry against gay, lesbian, and bisexual individuals is now widely considered to be beyond the pale. Right-wing activists, understanding they’ve lost on issues like same-sex marriage, gays in the military, adoption by gay and lesbian parents, and the battle over popular culture, are opening a new front in the war against the LGBTQ+ community. Their attacks involve a noxious effort to dehumanize trans people, which serves as a proxy for reinvigorating hyper masculinity, heterosexist authoritarianism, and fascist socio-political values.

GOP officials and other prominent political figures are signaling that it’s open season on trans Americans. Donald Trump announced after the Nashville shooting that the event was fueled by the “anger that was caused” from hormone treatments for transitioning individuals. Donald Trump Jr. similarly tweeted that there’s an “incredible rise” in trans-violence in America, and an “epidemic of trans-non-binary mass shooters.” Josh Hawley called the shooting “a horrific crime” and without evidence referred to it as “a hate crime” that was “specifically targeted” at the “Christian community,” while calling for an FBI investigation. Marjorie Taylor Greene postulated that the shooting represented a “trans day of vengeance,” blaming hormone treatments, prompting her to be suspended from Twitter. Greene asked: “How much hormones like testosterone and medications for mental illness was the transgender Nashville school shooter taking? Everyone can stop blaming guns now.”

Enlisting its foot soldiers in various media, the GOP disseminated its message of hate. Fox News’s Tucker Carlson included in his primetime program a photo of the shooter with the words “trans killer,” announcing that “we are witnessing the rise of trans violence” in America. Carlson issued a blanket attack on trans people, invoking reactionary Christian principles and natural law, claiming that “transgenderists hate Christians above all, because Christians refused to join every other liar in our society and proclaim that transgenderists are Gods with the power to change nature itself.”

Other rightwing pundits were equally extreme. Matt Walsh took aim at the “gender ideology movement,” depicting it as the “most hateful and violent movement in America,” and excoriating “leftwing trans extremists” as “violent, dangerous people who have been made to feel absolutely entitled to say and do whatever they want.” In the week after the Nashville shooting, Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA depicted gun deaths as “worth it” so long as individuals’ right to own guns is protected, and instead attacked “trans jihadists” and “trans radicals” who are “on a kind of holy crusade,” embracing “a lot of violent fantasies” against rightwing pundits and Americans. Benny Johnson, also of Turning Point USA, tweeted that “One thing is very clear: the modern trans movement is radicalizing activists into terrorists.” The comment was retweeted by Elon Musk, whose tweet was read by 7.8 million Americans.

The fantasy world constructed by rightwing pundits is far removed from the world we live in. Regarding mass shootings and domestic terrorism, there’s no evidence trans individuals represent a threat compared to other groups. While the Pew Research Center reports that 5 percent of young Americans 18-29 years old and 1.6 percent of adults identify as trans or non-binary, only four mass shootings since 2016 – or 0.11 percent of the 3,561 shootings in that time, were committed by trans or non-binary individuals.

Furthermore, the right’s baseless attacks on the trans community obscure the reality that the majority of domestic terrorism incidents in the U.S. – about two-thirds by the early 2020s – originated from rightwing political extremists, not LGBTQ+ individuals. By indulging in anti-trans propaganda and villainizing trans people, rightwing provocateurs divert attention from the primary domestic terror threat emanating from the right itself. This is an incredible example of projection, with rightwing pundits preventing GOP-allied Americans from looking in the mirror at the party’s dangerous rhetoric, which normalizes extremism and violence.

The GOP and its reactionary supporters invert reality with Orwellian propaganda claiming they are the real victims, and that others – including the LGBTQ+ community – are a threat to the nation’s survival. Contrary to this fantasy, trans individuals are systematically targeted by transphobic elements in America located primarily on the right. Trans youth are more likely to suffer from depression and are at higher risk of suicide because of being harassed, discriminated against, and terrorized by family, peers, the GOP, rightwing activists, and a political culture that treats them as a deviant and criminal.

The threat to trans youth is real. One Harvard University study finds that transgender teens face greater safety risks than other teens. Thirty-sex percent of transgender and non-binary teens who face “restricted bathroom or locker room access” report “being sexually assaulted,” compared to 25.9 percent “of all students surveyed.” Additional polling from the Kaiser Family Foundation finds that one in four trans individuals have been physically attacked “because of their gender identity, gender expression, or sexual orientation”; 64 percent say they have been verbally attacked, while 41 percent report “being harassed or feeling unsafe in a restroom or locker room.” This is a far cry from the baseless claim that trans people are predators waiting to strike in bathrooms and locker rooms.

Never missing a chance to portray themselves as victims, right-wingers’ demonization of trans people reveals their commitment to fascist ideology and politics. Their attacks are not based in simple conservatism. It’s true that historically, gay men have been subject to fascistic-style violence, stigmatized as perverts and child molesters, and as deeply immoral – terrorized by a society that was committed to denying their very existence, rights, and dignity. But the current shift to demonizing trans individuals represents an intensification of this historic repression campaign. Rightwing fascist politics and ideology have escalated the attack on trans people, who are dehumanized and assaulted by a political campaign that treats them as criminals. This updated version of fascism portrays trans people as an existential threat to the republic and to public safety. Trans identity is tied to mental illness and to an “epidemic” of violence, with trans individuals depicted as dangerous “radicals” and “terrorist” “killers” who are hell bent on destroying Christianity. If we accept such claims, what are we to do with such a group, other than neutralize them? This is the rhetoric of eliminationism, which is central to fascist politics.

The Orwellian fiction that it’s Christian Republicans – not trans persons – who are the real victims, is an integral part of fascist politics. Authoritarian leaders rely on lies, disseminated from political officialdom to the masses, which invert reality, deceive the public, and normalize bigotry and hatred against various others. The victims include racial, ethnic, gender, and religious minority groups, which are the first casualties in demagogues’ efforts to seize and consolidate political power. The demonization of trans people is useful for deflecting attention from a broader culture that worships guns, as fascist vigilantes feel empowered by minimal gun regulations to engage in mass shootings against those they deem a threat to the republic. The GOP won’t demonize guns and gun ownership, despite gun violence being an epidemic level threat to society. It’s much easier to reignite and intensify old bigotries against the LGBTQ+ community – one of the GOP’s favorite punching bags.

Rightwing officials and pundits are not alone in their assault on trans Americans. A sizable segment of the public buys into GOP hatemongering and is stoked by anti-trans rhetoric. As Dartmouth historian and religious studies professor Randall Balmer explains of Republican officials who traffic in anti-Trans rhetoric: “They have an interest in keeping the base riled up about one thing or another, and when one issue fades, as with same-sex relationships and same-sex marriage, they’ve got to find something else. It’s almost frantic.” Balmer’s insight speaks to a larger truth – that the rhetoric of fear, concentrating on an ominous and threatening other, is a powerful tool of political and social control.

A large segment of the public embraces anti-Trans beliefs, which fuel the GOP’s onslaught against this group. Pew polling from 2022 found that 43 percent of Americans expressed “discomfort” with “the pace of change around issues of gender identity” in the U.S. – speaking to the preference of a large minority of Americans to roll back the push for transgender equality and rights. The attack on trans people goes beyond simple discomfort, venturing into a full-blown assault on their right to exist and to maintain a public presence in America. This much is clear in Harris’s 2023 polling, which finds that 51 percent of Americans agree public school teachers should be prohibited from discussing gender identity and sexual orientation-related issues with students, and with 78 percent saying these discussions shouldn’t be allowed between teachers and K-3rd grade students.

The attack on trans people is also evident in relation to transitioning. Harris’s poll revealing that 55 percent of Americans agree gene hormone therapy for minors should be banned, even for those with parental permission. Pewpolling from 2022 finds that 72 percent of Republicans said the government should “make it illegal for health care professionals to help someone” who is younger than 18 “with medical care for gender transition,” while 69 percent of Republicans agreed government should “require trans individuals to use public bathrooms that match the sex they were assigned at birth.” Such attacks speak to the politics of eliminationism. As the thinking goes, there’s no need to be concerned about transgender rights if young Americans are taught that trans people don’t exist because they’ve been erased from public discourse and public spaces like restrooms. There’s no need to be concerned about rightwing bigotry if trans-gender youth are not allowed to exist because the state prohibits people from recognizing that they exist.

The GOP mobilization of its base in favor of transphobic politics is made easier by the party’s attacks, which are recycled from previous efforts to demonize gay, lesbian, and bisexual individuals. Recent national polling from the Marcon Institute at Lehigh University reinforces this point. Marcon’s February 2023 survey of 1,021 Americans finds that 34 percent of Americans believe it’s “unnatural to identify as transgender.” A smaller number – 27 percent – say the same about gay, lesbian, and bisexual individuals. What’s revealing in this survey is the strong statistical overlap between how people answered both questions.

Utilizing statistical regression analysis of the Marcon survey, I examine how strong anti-gay, lesbian and bisexual attitudes are in predicting anti-trans beliefs, while “controlling” for other factors, including respondents’ party affiliation, self-described ideology, income, education, race, gender, and age. Answering “yes” to saying that gay, lesbian, and bisexual individuals are “unnatural” is associated with a 69 percent increased probability of adopting anti-trans beliefs. Anti gay, lesbian, and bi-sexual attitudes are a far stronger predictor of anti-trans beliefs than other factors, with partisanship and ideology (for Republicans and conservatives) associated with 9 and 8 percent increased likelihoods respectively of embracing anti-trans beliefs, after controlling for other factors in my analysis. What these data tell us are that the old bigotry against gay, lesbian, and bisexual Americans is a primary motivator for Republican Americans in their ongoing assault on the trans community.

Transphobia is a powerful force. It’s linked to various reactionary and authoritarian political values. Drawing on the Marcon survey, I find that agreement that it’s unnatural to identify as transgender is a significant predictor of 1. support for Trump; 2. willingness to vote for Trump in 2024; 3. support for the January 6 (J6) insurrectionists; and 4. support for authoritarian patriarchal values. The Marcon survey reveals the following, after controlling for the other factors included in my analysis:

+ Support for the belief that trans identity is unnatural is associated with a 30 percent increased likelihood of expressing a “positive” feeling “toward Donald Trump.” Transphobia is an even stronger predictor of Trump support than other factors, including Republican partisanship and conservative ideology, which are associated with 29 and 16 percent increased likelihoods respectively of approving Trump.

+ Transphobia is associated with a 32 percent increased likelihood of voting “for Donald Trump for president in 2024 if he wins the Republican primary,” whereas Republican partisanship and conservative ideology are associated with 31 and 15 percent increased likelihoods respectively of Trump voting.

+ Transphobia predicts support for the J6 insurrectionists, and is associated with a 28 percent increased likelihood of expressing “positive” feelings about “those who occupied the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.” In contrast, Republican partisanship and ideology are associated with 10 and 11 percent increased likelihoods respectively of supporting the J6 insurrectionists.

+ Finally, transphobia predicts support for authoritarianism, and is associated with a 34 percent increased likelihood of agreeing that “our country will be great if we honor the ways of our forefathers, do what the authorities tell us to do, and get rid of the rotten applies who are ruining everything.” In contrast, Republican partisanship and conservative ideology are associated with 6 and 13 percent likelihoods respectively of adopting this patriarchal-authoritarian value.

These statistical associations are important because of what they tell us about the political culture of the American right. Transphobia is significantly linked to heterosexism, patriarchy, and toxic masculinity. And it’s associated with an authoritarian way of viewing the world, via support for authoritarian political figures like Trump. Transphobia is heavily linked to strongman-authoritarian politics, via the embrace of Trump’s efforts on J6 to install himself for a second term by undermining the 2020 presidential election, and in deference to patriarchal authority figures – past and present. The patriarchal-authoritarian link to transphobia isn’t just about maintaining the privileges and power of white men who are leading the war on trans people. It’s about the authoritarian values at the core of transphobia – which are fundamentally about dehumanizing, suppressing, and denying equal rights to a historically repressed group.

The rise of transphobia should be understood within the wider socio-political context of trans activists claiming their place in the public sphere. Recent attacks are part of the predictable reactionary backlash against them. Pew polling reveals that only 30 percent of Americans in 2016 reported personally knowing someone who was transgender-identifying. By 2021, that number had grown to 42 percent. A growing number of LGBTQ+ Americans are effectively challenging rightwing bigotry, with serious victories for the movement, including the 2015 success in establishing the right to same-sex marriage. This has stoked significant anger on the right, resulting in an intensifying fascist campaign to depict trans people as a severe threat to life and society. The goal is to force trans people back into the closet, and to erase their existence from discourse, politics, and the public sphere.

The revitalization of anti-LGBTQ+ politics is having predictable consequences. Trans activist Imara Jones reflectsabout GOP propaganda: “This disinformation, one of the things that it is doing is further isolating, stigmatizing, and demonizing trans people, allowing us to be targeted by all forms of violence, both from the state and from individuals.” The legitimation of violence against trans persons, conducted on behalf of the state, speaks to rising fascist politics in America. When the trans community is framed as an existential threat to national security, the message that’s implicitly delivered to GOP supporters, the far right, and Americans is that it’s open season on this group. Republican officials maintain plausible deniability, despite stoking this hate, by refusing to explicitly call for violence – leaving the actual violence to their base.

What’s the best way forward to combat transphobia? A simple two-pronged strategy will likely yield the best results. First, for those who are willing to listen, empathy building must be a central objective. Previous political science research demonstrates that efforts to humanize trans people by telling Americans about the individual stories and struggles they face as people help to cultivate support for this group, in the process combating anti-trans bigotry. This lessons is reflected in recent research finding that LGBTQ+ activists must remain in the public light, showcasing their humanity and struggles, to effectively build mass support. Second, for those who are unwilling to listen and to reconsider their beliefs, the public and private shaming and stigmatization of transphobia will help to beat back the attacks from the purveyors of hate. For many individuals who embrace hateful values, it may be unrealistic to expect they’ll have a change of heart and mind in the foreseeable future. But they can be made to pay a real social cost for their hatred.

As a nation claiming to pride itself in democracy and equal rights, we need to set a new tone for political discourse that makes it clear there’s no place in our society for transphobic beliefs or for fascist messages portraying trans people as a threat to human life and security. No democracy can allow for this sort of demonization and discrimination to persist as the status quo, particularly when it means empowering those trafficking in disinformation, hatred, sexism, and authoritarianism.

Anthony DiMaggio is Associate Professor of Political Science at Lehigh University. He is the author of Rising Fascism in America: It Can Happen Here (Routledge, 2022), in addition to Rebellion in America (Routledge, 2020), and Unequal America (Routledge, 2021). He can be reached at: anthonydimaggio612@gmail.com. A digital copy of Rebellion in America can be read for free here.