Thomas Zimmer

https://mastodon.social/@tzimmer_history

Historian at Georgetown - Democracy and Its Discontents - Podcast: Is This Democracy https://anchor.fm/is-this-democracy - Newsletter: Democracy Americana https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/

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Last Notes

2024-07-03 21:51:04

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Unfortunately, this is not just the abstract manifesto of a feverish mind. It comes with concrete plans and a detailed strategy of how to take over and transform government into an autocratic revenge machine that can impose a reactionary vision against the will of the majority. /end
https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/project-2025-promises-revenge-oppression

2024-07-03 21:49:33

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Much of this sounds like Marjorie Taylor Greene might have said it to rile up the base. “This is Heritage, you know, not some fringe group on the right,” Roberts said in a New York Times interview. He is correct: This is what defines the center of conservative politics today. 11/

2024-07-03 21:48:38

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It is difficult to convey to people who don’t pay much attention to politics how much the power centers of conservative politics have been taken over by anti-democratic extremism. Meanwhile, rightwing leaders are maximally clear about the reactionary vision they want to impose on the country. 10/

2024-07-03 21:47:36

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Analytically, this is complete nonsense. But such an understanding of the enemy is pervasive on the Right. It provides the basis on which Republican Party, conservative establishment, and reactionary intellectual sphere have all given themselves permission to radicalize. 9/

2024-07-03 21:46:57

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There is, in Kevin Roberts’ view of the world, really only one enemy, one devil, that seeks to destroy America, this once great nation of freedom and virtue: Communism, fascism, progressivism, “wokeism,” it is all just the same, all just different disguises of socialism. 8/

2024-07-03 21:45:34

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According to Roberts, the domestic “woke” agenda is connected to America’s foreign enemies. He sees only two underlying dangers that are constantly colluding and conspiring to bring America down: Totalitarian China abroad and totalitarian “woke” elites at home, working together. 7/

2024-07-03 21:44:37

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There is, in this view of the world, no room for compromise, no justification for restraint: “Time is running short. If we fail, the fight for the very idea of America may be lost.” 2024, according to Roberts, is the “last opportunity to save our republic.” And destroy the “woke” Left. 6/

2024-07-03 21:43:27

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The Right’s plans for a return to power are driven by a desperate sense that nothing short of a reactionary counter-revolution will suffice to save nation from the onslaught of fundamentally anti-American woke,” “globalist” forces - and that there is very little time left to pull it off. 5/

2024-07-03 21:42:26

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“Project 2025” isn’t just about power in Washington. The Reactionary Right’s goal is to re-establish political, societal, and cultural dominance in all spheres of life and turn the clock back to before what Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts calls “the Great Awokening.” 4/

2024-07-03 21:40:34

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Kevin Roberts is not some moderate imposter who pretends to be hardcore so that he can blend in with the MAGAs because that is the direction the wind is blowing. He is a reactionary Catholic and part of the Religious Right – a true believer in the reactionary political project. 3/

2024-07-03 21:39:33

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I took a deep dive into the “Promise to America” Heritage president Kevin Roberts has offered in his foreword to the "Project 2025" report: It perfectly captures the siege mentality, self-victimization, and grievance-driven lust for revenge that are fueling the Right's plans. 2/

2024-07-03 21:38:37

Kevin Roberts believes he’s a noble defender of “real America” against a totalitarian “woke,” “globalist” assault from without and within.
“Project 2025” is his declaration of war against multiracial pluralism.
I wrote about his extremist worldview here:
1/
https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/project-2025-promises-revenge-oppression
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/724/719/265/947/551/original/b787eb3e198e9d23.jpeg

2024-07-01 18:16:34

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The Court is spearheading the attempts by a radicalizing minority to install ever more authoritarian forms of minoritarianism in order to secure their status against the will of the majority.
And as of right now, these radicalizing reactionaries are succeeding.
https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/the-rogue-court-vs-modern-democracy

2024-07-01 18:12:31

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The idea that those who founded the United States envisioned a super-body composed of unaccountable, all-powerful rulers clad in robes, free to reign entirely outside the structure of institutions that make up the political system, is preposterous. 5/

2024-07-01 18:11:29

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There is no consistent logic or principle beyond ideologically-driven power politics. Yes, the constitution insulates the Court from direct democratic control – but that doesn’t mean we should allow it to simply turn against democracy itself. 4/

2024-07-01 18:09:53

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The reactionary majority has gone rogue, occasional tactical restraint notwithstanding. The main reason why this Court has lost its legitimacy is not even how this majority came to be, but the way it has been asserting judicial supremacy in service of an extremist cause. 3/

2024-07-01 18:07:12

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We need to see the Supreme Court’s disastrous rulings in the context of the Right’s larger project to uphold traditional hierarchies of race, wealth/class, gender, and religion - all part of the attempt to halt the drive towards egalitarian, multiracial, pluralistic democracy. 2/

2024-07-01 18:03:53

America can accept this Supreme Court as legitimate and its rulings as the final word - or it can have true democracy and a functioning state. But not both.
Wrote this a year ago: The Rogue Court vs Modern Democracy
1/
https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/the-rogue-court-vs-modern-democracy

2024-06-19 13:17:28

Why the Right Has a Problem with Juneteenth
This, from last year, certainly holds up: Today’s Republican Party is dominated by reactionaries who stand in the political, ideological, and spiritual tradition of the (neo-) Confederacy.
Some thoughts - with an added voiceover option:
🧵1/
https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/why-the-right-has-a-problem-with

2024-05-11 12:22:26

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Whatever social, racial, and political progress we have achieved since the final third of the twentieth century: The protests of the 60s have had a lot to do with that. To reduce their legacy to “Nixon won” is simplistic and disingenuously reductive. 11/

2024-05-11 12:21:42

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The vast majority of young people who were politicized by the protests of the 60s didn’t become terrorists or just retreated into hedonism. Many actually channeled their frustration into new political ventures - their energy fueled the social movements of the 70s. 10/

2024-05-11 12:20:56

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The 1960s protesters were not rejecting the ideals America had always proclaimed – they were demanding the country finally live up to them. It was the anger over the gap between grand democratic promises and discriminatory realities that animated them. 9/

2024-05-11 12:19:36

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The campus was the epicenter of the “unrest” that was animated by a longing to overcome the status quo, as the students were convinced the elites in power were betraying the ideals and promises they constantly invoked to perpetuate and legitimize the existing system. 8/

2024-05-11 12:18:54

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What has entered our collective memory as “1968” was the culmination of student-led protests that erupted in around 60 countries at the same time. This was a truly transnational phenomenon, and those who protested perceived of themselves as part of a global movement. 7/

2024-05-11 12:18:11

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The 1960s loom large in the collective imaginary of mainstream America. 1968, in particular, is constantly invoked to lend more credence to the idea that we are currently looking at a destructive uprising, as young people are – yet again! – giving in to irrational impulses. 6/

2024-05-11 12:17:28

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The approach that dominates the mainstream discourse has been invariably used to delegitimize every major (left-coded) protest movement in history, very much including the ones that polite society today likes to affirm and claim as examples of the *good* protest. 5/

2024-05-11 12:16:41

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The accusations against the students are also disingenuously inconsistent: They are derided as *both* extremist ideologues (who never fight back when the armed agents of the state arrest them?) and cosplaying children (why send police in riot gear then?). 4/

2024-05-11 12:15:29

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This is certainly not how mainstream opinion has approached rightwing protests: When it comes to the Tea Party, Trump rallies, or Trucker convoys, we are asked to look for the least incriminating, most empathetic interpretation, one that does not foreground extremism. 3/

2024-05-11 12:14:37

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Commentators look for the most extreme voices and insist they define the whole movement. They often do this while conceding that the vast majority of students are genuine in their concern for the lives of innocent civilians. Why not foreground this reality about the protests? 2/

2024-05-11 12:13:46

Weekend reading: I wrote about how mainstream commentators constantly raise the specter of 1968 to denounce the student protests - willfully ignoring the long pattern of leftwing student movements acting as an indispensable corrective.
Some thoughts from this week’s piece:
🧵1/
https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/the-students-have-never-been-the
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/422/395/739/164/161/original/56368f409507f53f.jpeg

2024-05-10 14:48:33

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I am quoting a piece from a WaPo columnist there. Not my words.

2024-05-10 13:01:45

The Students Have Never Been the Enemy
Student protest movements have historically functioned as an indispensable corrective for America and the West. That is the legacy of 1968 we should be talking about.
A thread, based on my new piece:
🧵1/
https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/the-students-have-never-been-the
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/416/922/079/342/982/original/16c8ae0518429f06.jpeg

2024-05-09 23:57:22

The Students Have Never Been the Enemy
Student protest movements have historically functioned as an indispensable corrective for America and the West. That is the legacy of 1968 we should be talking about.
New piece:
https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/the-students-have-never-been-the
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/413/837/780/385/739/original/a7dbadffb1b4ee13.jpeg

2024-05-01 13:42:14

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The intended effect of equating student protests with the horrors of the mass atrocities committed by Nazi Germany is to legitimize violence against the protesters.
What a shameful, disgusting instrumentalization of the Holocaust.

2024-05-01 13:40:48

The actual Kristallnacht was a country-wide pogrom in November 1938 in which the Nazis killed hundreds of German Jews, threw tens of thousands in concentration camps, destroyed hundreds of synagogues and thousands of Jewish businesses.
Was even a single person hurt at Columbia?
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/366/114/857/091/753/original/82c8cb101addc3e1.jpeg