Chapter IV — (Anti)Fascism Class

Essays in American Studies from UC Berkeley, Spring 2026.

Who writes the secret history of America? Who draws the maps to the origins of the present crisis? The answer is that we do. Any of us and all of us. And in this class we will collectively imagine, illustrate maps and write the stories that guide us from the past to the future so that we may come to grasp the depths of the present crisis. Designed with a dual purpose of providing a history of the present moment while serving as an active laboratory for generating new knowledge, this course is both discussion seminar and writing workshop.

The theme for this year’s honors seminar is American (Anti)Fascism. This is a history that is all at once secret, contested and hidden in plain sight. Has America turned Fascist in 2026, or has it always been? And if there is Fascism afoot, can Anti-Fascism be far behind? What is at stake in this term: Fascism? Why should we apply it or not? And what is incumbent upon those in thought and action who understand the present crisis as one of Fascism?

You can find the essays written for this course here.

PART I: READING (ANTI)FASCISM

Week 1, January 21: Introduction

Welcome to everyone. Now, who are we? What are we doing here? And who are the ones who walked away from Omelas?

Reading and Work:
Robert O. Paxton, “What is Fascism?” 2004.
Ursula K. LeGuin, “The Ones that Walk Away from Omelas,” 1973.

Week 2, January 28: The Current Crisis

This collection of recent essays by prominent scholars, activists and journalists mark serious efforts to map the contours of the current crisis unfolding inside the United States. Focused on specific aspects of this moment, they cover everything from economics to immigration enforcement, genocide to Fascist aesthetics. These essays are all rather short and professionally written, serving and guides to the present and ideal models for the kind of essays we might aspire to write in this class.

Reading:
Robin D.G. Kelley, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals in the Age of Fascism and Genocide,” Boston Review, Summer 2025.

Melinda Cooper, “Family Capitalism and the Small Business Insurrection,” Dissent, Winter 2022.

Adam Serwer, “The Cruelty is the Point,” The Atlantic, October 3, 2018.

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, “Empire of Vice,” Boston Review, January 8, 2026.

Noura Erakat, “The Boomerang Comes Back,” Boston Review, Winter 2025.

Daniel Martinez Hosang, “Understanding the Rise of the Multiracial Right — And Why it Matters,” Political Research Associates, Oct 30, 2024.

Greg Grandin, “Trump’s Dated Strategy is Putting Us on a Path to World War III,” NYT, Dec 15, 2025.

Ashley Gilbertson, “War at Home,” Hammer & Hope, Winter 2025.

Davis Austin Walsh, “The Conservatives Who Don’t Think Trump is Going Far Enough,” Boston Review, Fall 2025.

Ed Simon, “Homeland Security’s Genocidal Aesthetics,” Hyperallergic, August 1, 2025.

Week 3, February 4: From Revolution to Dictatorship

How did the United States slide from the revolutionary uprisings of the summer of 2020 and the largest mass protests in US history to the Trump regime? To begin to understand this dynamic, we can turn to a relevant historical comparison, and one of the most important works in the history of political theory, Karl Marx’s The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

Marx’s question here is how did France move from the failed proletarian revolution of 1848 to the dictatorship of the buffoonish Louis Bonaparte III. In the course of this analysis we get a detailed discussion of French Revolutionary history, starting with the Grand Revolution of 1789 (try not to get lost in all the detail). But most importantly, we get a complex theory of how specific ideologies and class formations combine, dissolve and remake themselves in the midst of a prolonged crisis of representation. Alltogether this history is not unlike the political realignment of 2024.

This essay forms the origin point for all radical theories of dictatorship — what Marx calls Bonapartism — before the advance of Fascism in Italy, Spain and Germany in the 1920s and 30s, itself a reaction to the successful Bolshevik uprising in the USSR in 1917. Marx’s work is long and complex, so give it the time it demands. But I have also added three short pieces by major 20th century Marxists as early interpretations of interwar Fascism to help ground our discussion.

Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852.
Antonio Gramsci, “On Fascism,” 1921.
Klara Zetkin, “The Struggle Against Fascism,” 1923.
Leon Trotsky, “Bonapartism, Fascism and War,” 1940.

Week 4, February 11: Ordinary Men

How do ordinary men become genocidal killers? This is the question that haunts western ethical philosophy after Nazism and the Holocaust. But rather than delve into the abstract, historian Christopher Browning asks simpler questions: who were the real men who did the actual killing? What did they do and what did the doing do to them? What investment did they have in the killing and what price did they pay for their actions? In following a single division of German police officers sent to occupied Poland, Browning gives us a rigorous insight into what Nazism meant when a radical ideology came to ever more radical application.

Reading:
Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, 1998.

Screening:
Architecture of Doom: The Nazi Philosophy of Beauty (Peter Cohen, 1991).

Week 5, February 18: Anti-Fascism in America

If the US has always been Fascist, it has also always already been antifascist. This week we are reading an anthology of Antifascist critiques and movements in American history. This book is an extraordinary resource. And it is very big. In truth, I want you to read all the selections by Black, brown and Asian and feminist authors, like WEB DuBois, George Padmore, Amie Cesaire, Robert F Williams, Kathleen Cleaver, Barbara Erenrich and others. But there are gems throughout.

Reading:
The US Anti-Fascism Reader, Edited by Bill Mullen and Christopher Vials (Verso Books, 2020)

Read: Introduction (1–22); Sinclair Lewis (44–53); Georgi Dimitrov (54–63); WEB DuBois (84–87); George Padmore (88–96); Felix Morrow (122–126); FDR (141–143); Franz Neumann (144–160); Henry Wallace (161–165); WEB Dubois (166–170); Adorno et al (173–192); Amie Cesare (193–201); Civil Rights Congress (202–217); Robert F Williams (247–252); Asian American Political Alliance (255–259); Kathleen Cleaver (260–266); BBP (267–269); Penny Nakatsu (270–272); Old Mole (273–276); Ken Lawrence (289–299); Barbara Ehrenreich (300–310); Stuart Marshall (311–325); Anti-Racist Action (326–330); Sam Miller (331–338).

Screening: A Night At the Garden: An American Nazi Rally, 1939 (7min)
Screening: Der Fuehrer’s Face, Walt Disney (1943)

Week 6, February 25: Speculative Fiction and the Fascist Future

The Man in the High Castle is Philip K. Dick’s singular masterpiece, and one of the most important science fiction novels of the post war era. The novel is set in an alternative 1962 where a defeated USA is jointly occupied by the Germans and the Japanese while its characters chase after a mysterious novel offering an alternative history where the US was victorious.

Reading: PK Dick, The Man in the High Castle (1963)

Week 7, March 4: The Gender Phantasm and Global Fascism

Judith Butler is easily the most influential living philosopher in the world. A global icon in gender theory, queer theory and feminist philosophy, Butler pushed the bounds of critical theory for 30 years. Then, on an academic trip to Brazil, those boundaries broke, and they found themselves facing a physical assault from a group of reactionary “anti-gender” agitators who blamed them and their ideas of gender’s “performativity” for the collapse of the social order.

Why, Butler now asks, in their most public facing and accessible work to date, has the question of gender come to sit at the center of anti-democratic and fascist movements world wide? Butler’s work not only gives us a potent theory of gender and fascism, but they also help us map the rise of an international right wing and anti-trans movement.

Reading:
Judith Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender? 2024

Week 8, March 18: Technofascism, the Antichrist and AI Apocalypse

Fascism has always been both traditionalist and forward looking, revanchist and technologically advanced. And now, it would seem, it is fully on the throne of the Empire of AI. This week we will look at several of the most important figures in tech, politics and, believe it or not, theology, to take in the cutting edge of contemporary Fascist thought and practice, from Peter Theil’s antichrist to Elon’s “mechahitler.” This collection of websites, interviews, youtube videos and manifestoes is designed to introduce us to the place of technology — and AI in particular — at the forefront of the Trump era and the ideas — many of which are utterly unpopular and often shockingly stupid — that continues to fuel its political rise.

Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander, Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland, Romeo Dean, https://ai-2027.com/. April 3, 2025.
Marc Andreessen, The Techno-Optimist Manifesto, October 16, 2023.
Karen Hao, Prologue and Chapter 4, Empire of AI, 2025
Laura Bullard, “The Real Stakes, and Real Story, of Peter Thiel’s Antichrist Obsession,” Wired, Sept 30, 2025.
Peter Thiel, “Competition is for Losers,” Wall Street Journal, Sept 12, 2014.
Ross Douthat, “Peter Thiel and the Antichrist,” New York Times, June 26, 2025.
David Marchese, Interview with Curtis Yarvin, New York Times, January 18, 2025.
Mencius Moldbug (Curtis Yarvin), “A Formalist Manifesto,” April 24, 2007.
AI in Context, “If you Remember One AI Disaster, Make it this one,” YouTube, October 2, 2025.

Week 9, March 25 — Spring Break

Week 10, April 1: Gaza and the Future

What does the destruction of Gaza, conducted in plain sight, mean for a world that watched, recoiled in horror, and was yet unable to stop it? In this award winning work of memoir, reportage and theory, journalist and novelist Omar El Akkad chronicles the collapse of western moral superiority (again), the ongoing centrality of Islamophobia to the West, and the brutalizing consequences of witnessing without action.

Reading:
Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, 2025

PART II: WRITING WORKSHOP

Week 11, April 8: Pitch Session

Week 12, April 15: Writing Workshop

Week 13, April 22: Draft Workshop

Week 14, April 29: Draft Workshop and Illustrations

RRR, May 6: Publishing Party

You can find the essays written for this course here.

The Secret History of America was originally published in Secret History of America on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“They.”
“The federals who had you in are likely just a front, OK? It’s the outfit that’s behind them, a nationwide syndicate of financial tycoons, all organized in constant touch against the forces of evil, namely everything to the left of Herbert Hoover…”
Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket, 2025

On July 18, 2024, on the final day of the Republic National Convention in Milwaukee, just five days after the failed assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, a retired professional wrestling champion named Hulk Hogan took the stage in (character) to introduce his friend and fan, former President Donald J. Trump.

With a red headband, a large silver crucifix and a blue blazer, Hogan’s hype-man growl greeted the delegates as “a room full of real Americans, brother.” In a well rehearsed wind-up, Hogan began to remove his blazer revealing his trademark bronzed and bulked arms, and a t-shirt bearing an image of himself waving the American flag. Soon he was shouting: “But when They took a shot at my hero! And They tried to kill the next president of the United States.” The ecstasy induced by this pronoun driven conspiracy fed Hogan’s trademark striptease, as he tore the t-shirt bearing his own image to two, to reveal another t-shirt with the Trump Vance logo. “Enough was enough!” He shook to rapturous cheers from the delegates, “And I said let Trump-a-mania run wild.”

Hogan’s references to “They” — the third person pronoun offering a syntactical ambiguity of both agency and gender in the accusation of conspiracy — lies at the center of the MAGA movement’s ideological cohesion. This evil, conspiratorial, and gender nonbinary “They,” evoked by the spray tanned, septuagenarian masculinity shared by both Trump and Hogan, serves MAGA as what Judith Butler has described as a phantasm.

For Butler, this phantasm is: “a way of ordering the world that absorbs and reproduces anxieties and fears about permeability, precarity, displacement, and replacement; loss of patriarchal power in both the family and state; and loss of white supremacy and national purity.” (Who’s Afraid of Gender? p. 13)

“The contradictory character of the phantasm,” continues Butler, “allows it to contain whatever anxiety or fear… without having to make it cohere. Indeed, the liberation from historical documentation and coherent logic is part of an escalating exhilaration that feeds a fascist frenzy and shores up forms of authoritarianism.” (Who’s Afraid of Gender? p.16)

Contradiction, incoherence, and a deliberate lack of evidence, whether moral or empirical, in all things from debates about trade to the biology of human sexuality, defines MAGA’s world view. Indeed, if Adam Serwer’s recognition that “the cruelty is the point” summed up Trump’s first term, in his second term, it would appear that the hypocrisy is the point. And this hypocrisy, no less than the still evident cruelty, is a hallmark of fascist forms of governance.

I invoke Butler here in part because I think their new book — Who’s Afraid of Gender? (2024) — deserves a lot more attention for the power of its anti-fascist political analysis, and because I agree with them that gender sits at the center of this current formation.

Indeed, the fusion of the expansive and conspiratorial “They” and the particular transgender and nonbinary They was made explicit shortly after the RNC, when the Trump campaign began running a series of TV spots during the World Series accusing Kamala Harris of promising “tax payer funded sex change operations for prisoners and illegal aliens.” These ads ended with the campaign’s slogan: “Kamala is for They / Them. President Trump is for you.”

This phantasm, MAGA’s “They” is a reactionary psychosocial fantasy that derives its explanatory power from an explicitly incoherent blending of fact and fiction inherent in most conspiracy theories. It is a formidable ideological project that has enabled the richest and most powerful white men in the country to overthrow multiracial democracy by scapegoating one of the nation’s most vulnerable minorities — namely trans and nonbinary youth — all by evoking what Daffy Duck and Professor Butler might recognize as Pronoun Trouble.

Of course, Trump’s failed assassin was no “They.” The shooter’s name was Thomas Crooks, a 20 year old white male with no overt political ideology and little in the way of social connections. On July 19, the day after Hogan’s convention speech, the New York Times reported that Crooks lived in a “solitary corner of a nearly invisible life,” and that Crooks was “more like a 21st century school shooter than a John Wilkes Booth.” One expert interviewed stated plainly: “This was somebody intent on perpetrating mass violence and they happened to pick a political rally.” The fact that no one associated with Crooks has ever been investigated, arrested or prosecuted furthers the legal conclusion that there was no conspiracy, no They, behind the failed assassination attempt.

This reconfirmation of the terrifyingly ordinary place of mass shootings in America was quickly drowned out of the news cycle by the RNC and the growing consternation over Biden, who dropped out of the race three days later. More than a year of in depth investigative reporting on Crooks by the Times offered no revision to this assessment of his character and motivation. Although the reporters did discover that he had asked google, “How far was Oswald from Kennedy?” 6 days before the shooting.

This dynamic escalated dramatically with the murder of Charlie Kirk, in which the accused lone gunman — a white Mormon with no known political affiliations — has now been framed up as both Trans adjacent and Leftist. Though no co-conspirators have been charged in the Kirk case, this new “They” has been exploited by the MAGA FBI and Justice Department into a countersubversive crusade that seeks to declare every center-left social movement from No Kings to Antifa, BLM to Naked Bike Parades, not to mention declaring the existence of trans and non binary people as criminal, if not terrorist conspiracies.

MAGA’s conspiratorial inclination has been there from the start. Nearly 15 years ago, Donald Trump’s first stirrings of presidential ambition led with the Birtherism. By July of 2016, on the verge of winning his first term, polls indicated that Trump’s GOP base included nearly 71% who doubted that the current president was born in America, with 41% flatly denying Obama’s legitimacy as president. Indeed, the leading demographic indicator of a Trump voter in 2016 was not race, age or geography, but a belief that Obama was a “secret muslim.” This trajectory, riding a once fringe conspiracy theory into the White House, marks MAGA as a unique example of what Historian Richard Hofstadter described in his now classic 1963 essay, “The Paranoid Style of American Politics.”

For Hofstadter, the “Paranoid Style” evidenced what he called a “style of mind” found in social movements throughout US history, evoking the “qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy.” The political paranoid believes in “a ‘vast’ or ‘gigantic’ conspiracy as the motive force in historical events. History is a conspiracy,” writes Hofstadter, “set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendental power.” Yet, writing as a prize winning public intellectual at the highwater mark of mid-century consensus liberalism, Hofstadter argued that tolerating paranoid social movements like the Anti-Illuminati movement or John Birch Society, while keeping them confined to the fringes, was the necessary price to pay to preserve “the vital center.”

Yet, as the MAGA example demonstrates, the greatest flaw in Hofstader’s argument provides one of its deepest insights. Namely that conspiracy theories are not a fringe phenomena. Rather, the most dangerous conspiracy theories in American history — anticommunism or the war on terror for example — have always emerged from the center of political power.

This contradiction was theorized in the 1980s by Berkeley political scientist Michael Paul Rogin as “the countersubversive tradition.” Rogin, not unlike Butler, offers a theory of “political demonology” to call attention “to the creation of monsters as a continuing feature of American politics by the inflation, stigmatization and dehumanization of political foes.” These demonized enemies are easily listed as they shape our national identity, periodize our history and animate the repressive apparatus: the native savage, the rebellious slave, the bomb throwing anarchists, the subversive communists, foreign terrorists and now the woke They / Them. Such fears are not promulgated by extremists, but by politicians, opinion writers, business leaders and police who name the subversive enemy, and attach personal anxieties to violent political projects. “Fearing chaos and secret penetration the countersubversive interprets local initiatives as signs of alien power,” writes Rogin, “The countersubversive needs monsters to give shape to his anxieties and to permit him to indulge his forbidden desires. Demonization allows the countersubversive, in the name of battling the subversive, to imitate his enemy.”

In other words, for the demonologists from D.W. Griffith to Ronald Reagan to MAGA, every accusation is a confession.

But there is still another meaning of conspiracy that MAGA also embodies.

Returning to Hulk Hogan’s appearance at the RNC, behind the conspiratorial accusation, one finds the definitive network of real capitalist conspiracies that mark this moment. And we can begin with the almost quaint, traditional forms of corruption linking Trump and Hogan via their longtime business partners in the WWE (namely Vince and Linda McMahon, who is now, and for as long as the agency survives, the secretary of Education).

More importantly, The wrestler’s sexual projection evoked the secret relationship between Hogan and the ultra wealthy, ultra conservative, Stanford educated and antichrist obsessed venture and surveillance capitalist Peter Thiel. Theil not only purchased JD Vance’s Ohio Senate seat in 2022 and secured his place on the 2024 ticket, solidifying reactionary tech’s ascension to state power, but as he was first forging his alliance with Trump in 2016, Theil secretly bankrolled a lawsuit on Hogan’s behalf to destroy their common enemy at Gawker media.

In 2012, Gawker media published a leaked tape of Hulk Hogan having sex with his best friend’s wife. Hogan called it a violation of his privacy, Gawker said it was news. Hogan sued Gawker, and in 2016 a Florida Jury awarded Hogan — whose real name is Terry Bollea — $140 million dollars in damages, a sum that drove the once sprawling media empire into bankruptcy. Shortly after the verdict, financial journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin revealed that the lawsuit had been bankrolled by Thiel to avenge an article published in Vallywag — Gawker media’s silicon valley gossip site — that outed Theil as Gay back in 2007. Vallywag was feared by the increasingly imperial tycoons of the valley, with Thiell calling the outlet, “the silicon Valley equivalent of al Qaeda.”

Theil’s successful conspiracy against Gawker is just one among myriad examples of the billionaire class secretly trying, and largely succeeding, to manipulate if not outright purchasing the news media that critically covered them. In forging this alliance between Hogan, Theil and Trump, we find perhaps our era’s definitive expression of what Karl Marx and Emma Goldman once called “the conspiracy of capital” — an openly authoritarian ruling class plot against the free press, the rule of law, popular democracy and consensus reality.

“Those who persistently blame others for indulging in conspiracies,” wrote Theodor Adorno,, “have a strong tendency to engage in plots themselves.” This may have never been more true about any American political figure than Donald Trump.

Indeed, it is worth remembering that one of the oldest definitions of conspiracy comes from the common law, where conspiracy is first and foremost a criminal agreement, a crime that the current President of the United States has been convicted of 34 times stemming from yet another sexual coverup that the Manhattan District Attorney’s charging documents described as “a conspiracy to undermine the integrity of the 2016 election.”

Though it is at least 400 years old in its current form, the conspiracy doctrine at law still defies a simple definition, let alone consistent application in courts of law. Derived from the Latin con-spirae — meaning to breath together — a conspiracy is at its most basic a criminal agreement, an ill-intended collective forged through secretive and binding speech acts dedicated to a sinister purpose. Known as the “darling of the prosecutor’s nursery,” even famous prosecutors couldn’t agree on the law’s boundaries. Supreme Court Justice and lead prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, Robert Jackson described the criminal conspiracy charge as “that elastic, sprawling and pervasive offense,” further claiming that it “almost defied definition.” Harvard law professor and civil liberties activist Zechariah Chafee Jr agreed, writing in 1941: “So long as we apply the notoriously loose common law doctrines of conspiracy and incitement offenses of a political character, we are adrift on a sea of doubt and conjecture.”

It is in this sense that conspiracy theories and conspiracy laws intersect, and where the ideological fantasy meets the material realities of power and political repression. So while a countersubversive phantasm animates much of what MAGA believes, my effort here to include the history of conspiracy laws in an argument about conspiracy theory, enables us to take a wider view of the role of Conspiracy in American life.

In general, the concept of conspiracy consists of three interrelated horizons wherein a conspiracy is a criminal act, a political plot, and a theory of history. Each horizon offers its own scale of action, level of abstraction and narrative form, from a plan to rob a bank, a plot to overthrow the government, to a secret society that seeks to control the world.

Real conspiracies like Nat Turner’s rebellion, la Cosa Nostra, Watergate, al-Qaeda, the Christmas Adventurers Club, the Illuminati, or Trump’s plot to blackmail universities, privatize the military and immigration enforcement, steal 230 million from the justice department, resegregate the federal workforce, or hire Theil’s company Palantir to spy on all Americans, each emerges from one horizon while bleeding out into the other two. This movement between the criminal to the political to the theoretical horizons, on both the level of both narrative and methodology, becomes the work of conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theories, then, in their explicitly prosecutorial and accusatory forms, are simply the speculative stories we tell each other about what are, or were, real conspiracies ranging from the Kennedy assassination, to the Mafia to Q-Anon and back again.

This approach to conspiracy builds on the work of Frederic Jameson, not only for his foundational work on conspiracy narratives in film, but in his work on “narrative as a socially symbolic act.” “Conspiracy,” writes Jameson, “is the poor person’s cognitive mapping… [I]t is a degraded figure of the total logic of late capital, a desperate attempt to represent the latter’s system, whose failure is marked by its slippage into sheer theme and content.” Cognitive mapping, in Jameson’s terms, is the necessary aesthetic project of representing the social system. Such maps inevitably dwarf the individual, overwhelming their efforts to understand the forces which structure daily life, political power and the common future. Inevitably imperfect, we all depend upon what Jameson calls the “mental map of the social and global totality we all carry around in our heads in various garbled forms.” For Jameson, conspiracy theories therefore fulfill a similar role to ideology itself, in that as a narrative form, they project imaginary resolutions to real contradictions, meaning that most conspiracy theories have real, material, even institutional sources.

We can apply this approach to map the broad distinctions between left and right theories of conspiracy, and between what we perceive as real versus paranoid versions of conspiracy. The mode of detective fiction a la Dashiell Hammet or Chester Himes is typical of left wing approaches, in which we begin with the investigation of a crime, which leads up the social ladder to narrate the world of political corruption and manipulation, before revealing just a glimpse of the true source of power that the hireling preterite gumshoe can never hope to touch. Whereas from within the phantasm, the right of Q-Anon believers begin with a grand conspiracy metanarrative that spawns myriad imaginary political plots of the deep state and the woke agenda, that then activate self-anointed saviors who go looking for conspiratorial crimes to thwart, like the young white man who attacked Comet Pingpong in Washington DC looking for a democrat run child rape dungeon, or the mob who attacked the Capital on January 6, 2021 to “stop the steal.”

As such, the power to define what is and is not a conspiracy, and what is and is not a conspiracy theory, is a jealously guarded privilege, and there is a lot at stake in this question. After all, this is what happens when the police declare a march or demonstration to be an “unlawful assembly” before the truncheons and gas come out, or when the President declares Anti-fascism to be domestic terrorism, or when a professional wrestler evokes an assassination conspiracy to unleash the lawlessness of Trumpamania.

What we find in the politics of conspiracy, set between the accuser and the enemy, the legal doctrine and the ideological representation, is a distinctive political and historical dynamic whereby conspiracy begets conspiracy in an escalating dialectic of conspiracy in which the stakes are both all too material and dangerously ideological. This is why conspiracy theory remains an explicitly divisive terrain in US history, fractured indelibly along lines of race, class, gender and sexuality. And this is why it may be, in our era of shattered consensus, that conspiracy becomes a central point of contestation between the social movements for justice and the increasingly fascist state.

Michael Mark Cohen is Professor of Teching in American Studies and African American Studies at UC Berkeley. He is the author of The Conspiracy of Capital: Law, Violence and American Popular Radicalism in the Age of Monopoly. You can check out his archive of radical cartoons at www.cartooningcapitalism.com.

This essay first appeared as a talk at the UC Berkeley Social Science Matrix on October 27, 2025. You can see the video of the full panel and discussion here.

They/Them: MAGA’s Conspiratorial Style of American Politics was originally published in Secret History of America on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Readings in Cultural Theory: Syllabus

American Studies 110: UC Berkeley — Fall 2023
Professor Michael Mark Cohen

Introduction:
As an academic discipline, American Studies takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of US culture in all its forms. From music to architecture, literature to advertising, American Studies has broken down the distinctions between art and politics, labor and leisure, fine arts and popular culture. Throughout its history, American Studies has pushed the boundaries of academic inquiry by placing questions of race, class, gender and sexuality, power and resistance into the center of our inquiry, pressing what was once the margins of American life into the center of this dynamic and radical field. Yet, as the founder of Cultural Studies Raymond Williams reminds us, culture is one of the most complex words in the English language, encompassing a range of meanings from the anthropological to the biological to the aesthetic. Therefore, in this course we will take up the question of culture and theories of culture within Cultural Studies and American Studies by reading both classical works and new directions in cultural theory.

INTRODUCTION

Week 1: August 23
Opening day: What is Culture and Why Study It?

PART 1: Foundational Works in Cultural Theory

Week 2: August 30
The Foundations of Cultural Studies
*Raymond Williams, “Culture is Ordinary” (1958)
“Capitalism” to “Culture,” Keywords (1976)
“Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory” (1973)
*Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies” (1992)
*Michael Denning, “The Socioanalysis of Culture: Rethinking the Cultural Turn” (2004)
Reading Notes: Prioritize the first two, shorter Williams essays, and do your best with the third, which is more difficult and focused on Marxist theory (this will help for next week). The Hall piece is something of a personal history of the field of Cultural Studies and the Denning is a larger intellectual history of the “cultural turn.”

Week 3: September 6
Marxism and Representation
Karl Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)
Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)
Reading Notes: The Preface is short but theoretically dense, we will discuss it in detail in class. The 18th Brumaire is Marx’s history of how France slid into a dictatorship after the failed revolution of 1848. There is a lot of complicated French history here, but read it less for the detail than the larger argument about class, politics and revolution.

Week 4: September 13
Culture, Politics and Hegemony
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (International Publishers, 1971)
Reading Notes: For selections and order for reading see https://thedigradio.com/gramscinotebooksLinks to an external site.
This selection is made by Michael Denning and I suggest you start at the beginning of this list and get as far as you are able. At the very minimum read the following sections: “Brief Notes on Machiavelli’s Politics,” 125–133; “Some Preliminary Points of Reference,” 323–343; “The Formation of the Intellectuals,” (5–14).
Optional Readings:
*Stuart Hall, “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,” (1986)
*Michael Denning, “Everyone a Legislator,” (NLR May/June 2021)
Podcast: The DIG: Gramsci & Hegemony w/ Michael Denning Links to an external site.Links to an external site.

Week 5: September 20
Modernity and Culture
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility (2008), selections.
Reading Notes: Again, read as much of this outstanding volume as you can, but focus on pages 19–165, 274–298, 323–341. At minimum read the following essays in this order: 1. The Work of Art, 8. Author as Producer, 9. Paris: Capital of the 19th Century, 28. A Little History of Photography.

Week 6: September 27
Art and Visual Culture
John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972)
*Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975)
You can watch the original BBC shows “Ways of Seeing” on Youtube
Or you can read a fully illustrated on-line version of the book here (maybe the best version available)!
Reading Notes: Berger’s book is a classic work of popular education in the cultural studies of art. It is highly readable and its mostly pictures. Or you can just watch the BBC videos on Youtube. Laura Mulvey’s essay is a landmark in feminist film criticism, perhaps marking the theoretical discovery of the “male gaze.” The essay can be difficult in its psychoanalytic commitments, but the point of “scopophilia” remains critical.

Week 7: October 4
Postmodernism and Periodization
*Frederic Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” (1979)
“Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (1991)
“Cognitive Mapping” (1988)
Reading Notes: Jameson’s writing style is very dense and his range of references knows few bounds, thus he is both lucid and very challenging to read. If you can work through them, these essays shed a great deal of light on the political significance of mass culture and historical periodization. At the minimum, try to read through “Reification and Utopia” — which ends with readings of Jaws and The Godfather. Then start the “Postmodernism” essay and get as far as you can. Jameson’s methods are succinctly set out in “Cognitive Mapping.”

PART 2: New Directions in Cultural Theory

Week 8: October 11
Race, Ethnicity, Nation
Stuart Hall, The Fateful Triangle (2017)
Reading Notes: This is a series of three public lectures offered by Stuart Hall near the end of his life and presents a clear articulation of his understanding of race and nation. Skip the many introductions and make sure to read through chapter 1, “Race-the Sliding Signifier.” Read the rest if you have time.

Week 9: October 18
History and Power
Michel Rolph-Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995)
Reading Notes: This whole book is brilliant, like the others, but written in a much more engaging style. At a minimum, focus on Chapter 1, 3 and 4.

Week 10: October 25
Black Feminist Methods
*Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts” (2008)
“The Belly of the World” (2016)
“The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner” (2018)
Reading Notes: Hartman may be the singular star writing in the Humanities at the moment. These essays, each a methodological elaboration to accompany each of her books, are intellectually rigorous and morally searching. At a minimum read Venus in Two Acts.

PART 3: Contemporary Practices of Cultural Studies

Week 11: November 1
Sex and the Labor Theory of Culture
Heather Berg, Porn Work: Sex, Labor and Late Capitalism (2021)
Reading Notes: Start at the beginning and get as far as you can. I think you’ll want to keep reading.

Week 12: November 8
Doing Cultural Studies Now
Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion (2019)
Reading Notes: These essays all began their lives on the internet, published for a mass reading audience. This is a style of writing that all of us can recognize and reach for. Read as much as you can, but focus on “The I in Internet,” “Always be Optimizing,” and “The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams.”

Week 13: November 15
Discussion and Paper Workshop.
Notes: Bring your ideas and your texts for your paper to class and we will discuss them together to help everyone build ideas, sharpen arguments and get started writing.

Week 14: November 22 — No Class

Week 15: November 29
Last Day of Class
Students will give brief presentations about the chosen text for their paper

Final Paper is Due: Thu, Dec 14, 11:00am

Readings in Cultural Theory was originally published in UC Berkeley Writings on Cultural Studies on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Secret History of America, Chapter III

Pandemic Election Survival Edition — UC Berkeley American Studies Seminar Spring 2020

America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
 — Allen Ginsberg, America. Written in Berkeley, January 17, 1956.

The 2020 edition of the Secret History of America is set during the apocalypse. Not necessarily the end of the world, although given the prominence of what the Bay Area now calls “Orange Sky Day” in these essays, this possibility is manifestly closer than ever. Rather I am referring to the Greek root of the term apocalypse, meaning an unveiling or revealing, a moment in which the veil is lifted from our protected eyes and the deeper realities of the world, its cruelty, corruption and contradictions are revealed for all to see.

This unveiling reveals a radically diminished world, a world in which all the once firm social bonds, daily rhythms, and reasonable expectations for our lives have been suspended, prohibited or rendered dangerous. COVID-19 did not just suspend the ordinary flow of time, but it exposed our deep human interdependence and thus upended our social contracts. The elderly, poor, incarcerated and undefended die alone. The young suspend the promises of their youth. The angry collect guns and lie to themselves. And a bloated and bronzed Nero fiddled while democracy burns.

This year killed our heroes: RBG and EVH, Black Panther and James Bond, Kobe and Maradona, Alex Trebeck and John Lewis. It also killed the movies, live music, book parties, sex, your favorite bar, blue skies, Thanksgiving, your faith in the future, and probably someone that you know personally. We know, intellectually, that History is long and exceedingly complex; but it’s hard not to take all this very very personally.

After all that we’ve experienced this year — a spring of broken presidential primaries, a summer of protests and violent counter-revolution, a fall of high-anxiety-low-expectation voting, and now a winter of death and despair — the result is that the secret history of America stands exposed, its secrets once held close are now openly spilled across cable news, twitter feeds, the blood in the streets. And across this collection of stunning personal essays.

The essays included in this publication confront this unveiling directly, they map its contours and expand on its consequences. They mark a generational confrontation with a broken planet, a betrayed democracy, a diminished social world, and an economic system enthralled by mass death. These essays are the product of fertile minds, a supportive community of thinkers and writers, and a professor eager to listen and learn from the wisdom of the young and angry.

Given the freedom to write, to express themselves in whatever form or subject they choose, this collection of essays reveal something profound: It shows us what the world looks like to young people after all the illusions, all the dissembling, and all the false hopes have fallen away and the need to survive rises back to the surface. They tell the story of how one situates themselves in a world on the cusp of its end but where a new one has yet to appear on the horizon.

The Syllabus

Who writes the secret history of America? Any of us and all of us. Some can, some do, and in this class we will try.

Week 1 — August 27
Introduction etc.
Create a Medium.com account and read around an hour or so.

Week 2 — September 3

Arundhati Roy, “Pandemic as Portal,” Financial Times (April 3, 2020).

Achille Mbembe, “The Universal Right to Breathe,” Africa is a Country (June 17, 2020).

John Lewis, “Together, You Can Redeem The Soul of Our Nation.” NY Times (July 30, 2020).

Adam Serwer, “The Cruelty is the Point” The Atlantic (October 3, 2018).

Miriame Kaba, “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police,” NY Times (June 12, 2020).

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, “Of Course There Are Protests” NY Times (May 29, 2020).

Ed Yong, “How the Pandemic Defeated America,” The Atlantic (August 3, 2020).

Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style of American Politics” (1965)

Week 3 — September 10

Michel-Rolph Truillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History

Week 4 — September 17

Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals

Week 5 — September 24

Jonathan Metzl, Dying of Whiteness: How The Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland

Week 6 — October 1

Astra Taylor, Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss it When Its Gone…

Week 7 — October 8

Roderick Ferguson, We Demand: The University and Student Protests

Week 8 — October 15

Daniel Martinez Hosang and Joseph E Lowndes, Producers, Parasites and Patriots: Race and the New Right Wing Politics of Precarity

Week 9–15 pitch, draft, edit, revise, illustrate and publish essays.

The Secret History of America was originally published in Secret History of America on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Public Course Syllabus for L&S 25 — Arts and Design @ Berkeley University of California at Berkeley, Spring 2017

Professors:

Natasha Boas, Independent International Curator.
Michael Mark Cohen, Associate Teaching Professor of American Studies and African Studies.

Lectures:

Mondays, 12–2 in LeConte 3
Wednesdays, 12–2 in the BAM / PFA Theater (OPEN TO THE PUBLIC)

Course Description:

What is a counterculture? What kind of culture does a counterculture counter? Can culture be a space of political opposition? Can culture be revolutionary? Activists and artists have asked these questions for generations, seeking out new ideas and new art forms while struggling to create a new world within the shell of the old.

What is a counterculture? What kind of culture does a counterculture counter? Can culture be a space of political opposition? Can culture be revolutionary? Activists and artists have asked these questions for generations, seeking out new ideas and new art forms while struggling to create a new world within the shell of the old.

This class, BIG IDEAS L&S 25: California Countercultures, looks at the range of countercultural expressions in the Bay Area centering around the decade of the 1960s. Berkeley occupies a vital place in counterculture history and mythology, and throughout this class we will consider this confluence of art and politics, community and memory that make the East Bay such a unique place in American culture.

This class is designed to introduce students to the full range of art and design resources at UC Berkeley. Developed around the new exhibit at the Berkeley Art Museum on “Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia,” curated by UC Berkeley professor Greg Castillo, this class combines academic lectures and discussion sections with museum visits, performances at Zellerbach Hall, films at the Pacific Film Archive and an extraordinary speakers series of Bay Area countercultural figures curated by Natasha Boas. These lectures are held in the PFA auditorium and are open to the public.

Links to Related Exhibits and Events at UC Berkeley:

Berkeley Art Museum: Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia

Arts & Design @ Berkeley: California Countercultures Speakers Series

Pacific Film Archive: Cinema & Counterculture 1964–1974

Books to Buy:

1. Guy DeBord, The Society of the Spectacle (Black and Red)
2. Rebecca Solnit, ed. Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas (UC Press)
3. Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems (City Lights Pocket Poets Series)
4. Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (Harper Perennial)
5. Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo (Scribner)
6. Ursula Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven (Scribner)

Schedule:

Part 1 — Introduction

Week 1: Arts and Design @ Berkeley
Wednesday, January 18th — BAM / PFA Theater

Part 2 — The Making of a Counterculture

Week 2: Aesthetic Activism & Modernist Methodologies
Guest Speaker: Wednesday, January 25th — BAM / PFA Theater
Natasha Boas, “Beat Notes: From the Rat Bastards to the Mission School”

Performance: Sunday January 29th — Cal Performances Presents Steve Reich at Hertz Hall.

Reading: Dada and Surrealism: Texts and Extracts (1920s)
Guy DeBord, Society of the Spectacle [1967] (Black & Red, 1983)
Raymond Williams, “Base & Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory”

Week 3: Golden State Radicalism
Guest Speaker: Wednesday, February 1st — BAM / PFA Theater
Iain Boal, “On the Left Edge: California’s Renegade Tradition”

Reading: Jack London, “South of the Slot” (1909)
Rebecca Solnit: Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas (pages 1–84)

Part 3 — The Long Sixties in the Bay Area

Week 4: The Beats
Guest Speaker: Wednesday, February 8th — BAM / PFA Theater
Jack Hirshman, “The North Beach Beat Generation”

Gallery Talk: Wed, February 8, 1:30 pm with Curator Greg Castillo

Reading: Allen Ginsburg, Howl and other Poems (City Lights, 1956)
Selected Poetry and Prose by Ferlinghetti, Amiri Baraka and Diane di Prima
Diane di Prima, Revolutionary Letters 1968–1971

Week 5: Civil Rights & the New Left
Guest Speaker: Wednesday, February 15th — BAM / PFA Theater
Speaker: Leigh Raiford, “Civil Rights Movement Photography & Its Legacies”

Museum Visit: Black Panthers at 50 @ the Oakland Museum of California, exhibit closes Feb 26th

Reading: Early Student Movement Documents (1959–1962)
Students for a Democratic Society, “The Port Huron Statement” (1962)
Herbert Marcuse, The One Dimensional Man (1964)
Mario Savio, Berkeley Fall (1965)
Ronald Reagan, “The Morality Gap at Berkeley” Video of Speech (1966)
Jerry Rubin, Do It! (1970)

Week 6: Hippie Modernism
Guest Speaker: Greg Castillo, “Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia”

Museum Visit: “Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia” at BAM

Reading: Time, “The Hippies: Philosophy of a Subculture” (July 7, 1967)
Greg Castillo, “How Bay Area Design Radicals Tried to Save the Planet.”

Week 7: Paranoid California Literature
Guest Speaker: Wednesday, March 1st — BAM / PFA Theater
Michael Mark Cohen, “Pynchon’s Paranoid California”

Reading: Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
Radical Student Union, The Uses of UC Berkeley: Research (1969)

Week 8: Disobedient Objects & Alternative Spaces
Guest Lecture: Monday, March 6th
Protest Posters at CAL School of Design with Waverly Lowell, Curator Environmental Design Archives College of Environmental Design, UCB.

Guest Speaker: Wednesday, March 8th — BAM / PFA Theater
Speaker: Dena Beard, Director and Chief Curator The Lab, “Experimental Art and Subjectile Space.”
Featuring a performance by Brontez Purnell: Emotional/Content.

Reading: Rebecca Solnit, Infinite City (85 — end)
Newsweek, “California: University on Trial” (November 23, 1970)
Tom Wilson, “Paper Walls: Political Posters in an Age of Mass Media”
Scott Montgomery, “Signifying the Ineffable: Rock Poster Art & Psychedelic Counterculture in SF”
Deanne Pytlinski, “San Francisco Video Collectives and the Counterculture”

Week 9: Black Power & Black Arts
Guest Speaker: Wednesday, March 15th — BAM / PFA Theater
Ishmael Reed, “Poetry and Protest”

Performance: Tuesday, March 14th — Cal Performances Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater

Reading: Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo (1972)
Colette Gaiter, “Black Panther Artist Emory Douglass”
Angela Davis, et. al. If They Come in the Morning (1971)
Black Panther Party, Guest Editor, CoEvolution Quarterly (Fall 1974)

Week 10: Feminism & Public Practice
Guest Speaker: Wednesday, March 22nd — BAM / PFA Theater
Laura Pérez, “Ana Mendieta: Decolonialized Feminist and Artist”

Reading: Suzanne Lacy, “The Name of the Game” (1996)
Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” (1971)

Week 11: Spring Break

Week 12: Psychedelics and Consumer Culture
Guest Lecture: Monday April 9
“Drugs and Cults in the Age of the Holy Biosphere” with Dr. Jelena Martinovich, Harvard University

Guest Speaker: Wednesday, April 5th — BAM / PFA Theater
Stephanie Syjuco, “Art/Politics/Aesthetics (notes from the field)”

Reading: Stewart Brand, The Whole Earth Catalog (№1, Fall 1968)
Mark Harris, “Countercultural Intoxication: An Aesthetics of Transformation”

Part 4 — Contemporary Countercultures from Punk to Occupy

Week 13: The Struggle for Utopia
Guest Speaker: Wednesday, April 12 — BAM / PFA Theater
Peter Coyote, “Diggers, Communes & Counterculture & the Death of Hope”

Reading: Ursula Le Guin,The Lathe of Heaven (1971)
Peter Coyote, “Carla’s Story” (1992)

Week 14: DIY: Bricolage & Punk

Artist Speaker: Kal Spelletich “San Francisco Machine Art” Monday, April 17

Guest Speaker: Wednesday, April 19 — BAM / PFA Theater
V.Vale, RE/Search publications, “San Francisco Punk,” with film screenings by Marian Wallace.

Reading: Excerpts from Search & Destroy 1–11 (1977–79)
RE/Search #6/7: Industrial Culture Handbook (1983)

Week 15: Countercultures: Co-Opted and Enduring
Guest Speaker: Wed, April 26 — BAM / PFA Theater
Mark Pauline & Amy Critchett, Survival Research Labs and Bay Lights,
“Go Big or Go Home: when too much is never enough”

Reading: Strike Debt, The Debt Resisters’ Operations Manual (2014)
Thomas Frank, Why Johnny Can’t Dissent, The Baffler (1995)
Sunaura Taylor & Rebecca Solnit, “Scenes from Occupied Oakland” (2011)
Elizabeth Jochum & Ken Goldberg, “Cultivating the Uncanny: The Telegarden & Other Oddities”

California Countercultures was originally published in California Countercultures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A Seminar in American Studies at UC Berkeley:
Apocalypse Election Now 2016

Who writes the secret history of America? Any of us and all of us can, do, and in this class we will try.

This seminar looks at how politics becomes fiction and fiction becomes politics. Naturally, with such a theme, the 2016 election will be an ongoing object of inquiry for us as we read current events into a cluster of “political” novels by local authors like Jack London, Ishmael Reed and Ursula Le Guin. We will read three non-fiction works, including books by local ethnographers and activists. We will turn these conversations into a collection of essays, two essay each to be exact, that we will collectively publish in collaboration with Medium.com. The first essay will be explicitly political, to be published before the election; the second will be whatever we decide we want to write.

Week 1 — August 24
Introduction to Course

Week 2 — August 31
Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style of American Politics (1965)
Raymond Williams, Base and Superstructure in Marxist Theory (1980)
Andrew Sullivan, “Democracies fail when they are too Democratic” May 1, 2016
Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Case for Reparations, June 2014
Aziz Ansari, Why Trump Makes Me Scared for My Family, NYT, June 24,2016
Ashley Feinberg, Is Donald Trump’s Hair a $60,000 Weave? A Gawker Investigation, 2/24/16

Week 3 — September 7
Jack London, The Iron Heel

Week 4 — September 14
Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here

Week 5 — September 21
FIELD TRIP TO MEDIUM.com offices in San Francisco

Week 6 — September 28
Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo

Week 7 — October 5
Ursula K Le Guin, Lathe of Heaven

Week 8 — October 12
Arle Russell Hochschild, Strangers in their Own Land

Week 9 — October 19
Pitch Topics for Political Essays

Week 10 — October 26
Publish First Set of Election Essays

Week 11 — November 2
Publish Second Set of Election Essays

Week 12 — November 9
Post-Election Processing

Week 13 — November 16 Work on Essays
Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing

Week 14 — November 23 — No Class for Thanksgiving

Week 15 — November 30
Work on Personal / Object Essays

Week 16 — December 7
Publish Essays

The Secret History of America, Chapter II was originally published in Secret History of America on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

An Illustrated Soap Box Lecture

“I don’t know what you are even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacist” — Donald J. Trump on CNN 2/28/2016

“The time is past when the white world can exercise unilateral authority and control over the dark world…” Malcolm X, December 4, 1963

The 500 year old world historical project of racial white supremacy is coming to an end. Slowly, incompletely, necessarily, whiteness is ending. This is not to say that in the future we will be all be beige or all-tan-everything. There will always be white people. What I am saying, is that the global hegemonic racial project of white supremacy is coming to an end.

Begun by Columbus, lost in the Bahamas in 1492 and fueled by indigenous genocide, African slavery and capitalist accumulation, white supremacy created an ideology of biologically defined racial differences.

In this vision, white Europeans, scientifically rational and militarily powerful, were naturally superior to the darker races. This racial imaginary claimed for itself the universal form of humanity — MAN — who is naturally understood to be white and, well, male. Whiteness serves as the unmarked subject, the normal, the fully capacious form of universal humanity. Everyone else, women, people of color, the gender non-conforming or disabled, gets some form of discrimination and a hyphenated identity. Only white people get to be complete and whole.

This was and is a myth. Race as a biological theory of history is simply false. We are all, equally, members of the singular human race, myriad in its diversity, yet one in its common destiny. But race and racial stereotypes are no less consequential for being fictional.

In 1790 the newly independent USA granted citizenship to all “Free White Persons.” This established national identity by race from the very start. With the racism imbedded at the heart of settler colonialism and chattel slavery, the vision of biological race emerged to explain why millions could be displaced off their land and millions more held in perpetual bondage in the land of the free.

How can you have millions of enslaved Africans in a country dedicated to the Jeffersonian principle that “All Men Are Created Equal”? It turns out to be simple: in the new racial ideology of the founding fathers, those Indians and Africans are not men at all. They are instead, explains Thomas Jefferson, members of an inferior race, biologically incapable of self-governance, property holding and self-possession.

“American racial ideology,” writes the historian Barbara Fields, “is as original an invention of the Founders as is the United States itself. Those holding liberty to be inalienable and holding Afro-Americans as slaves were bound to end by holding race to be a self-evident truth.”

Or as Ta-Nehisi Coates writes: “Race is the child of racism, not the father.”

White supremacy endured in the USA after the Civil War forced expropriation in the form of emancipation. And it shaped world history in the form of settler colonialism, imperialism and war.

Yet it was with World War II that the expanding tide of world white supremacy reached its peak and cracked, shattering at the gates of Auschwitz and in the atomic flash over Nagasaki.

Photographic evidence of the evil committed in the name of white supremacy, colonialism (in Eastern Europe and East Asia), and technological progress could no longer be denied. With the Old World shattered, a global wave of liberation from European power spread over the post-war world in the form of Decolonization, Civil Rights and Labor movements, Feminism and sexual liberation.

“Unbiased scholars and unbiased observers agree,” claimed Malcolm X in 1963, “that the wealth and power of white Europe has rapidly declined during the nineteen-year period between World War II and today… You and I were born at this turning point in history,” he continued, translating religious prophecy into profane politics. “Our present generation is witnessing the end of colonialism, Europeanism, Westernism, or ‘White-ism’… the end of white supremacy, the end of the evil white man’s unjust rule.”

Radical activists like Malcolm X have to believe that either revolution or ruin is immanent, that history is just about to make its decisive turn. Unfortunately, change on the scale of ending “White World Supremacy” has proven to be a much longer, slower process.

While it is naïve of us to have ever imagined that President Obama could bring to an end 500 years of American white supremacy, it is equally cynical to suggest that his Presidency is not a sign of our progress, evidence of all too slowly improving race relations. If white supremacy exerted a racial dictatorship over the world for 450 years, Obama’s election marks a mere seven decades past the mid-twentieth century moment of peak whiteness.

Of course, Obama’s election alone has not forced this change. The Obama era has seen the rise of new social movements which are forcing us to change our language and see the world in new ways.

Occupy demanded economic justice for the majority of Americans (setting up Bernie Sanders’ successful primary challenge). Marriage equality has been achieved and the fight for LGBTQ civil rights continues to expand. Immigrant rights activists and Dreamers have forced a new discussion on citizenship. And Black Lives Matter has powerfully changed the conversation around race, police violence, mass incarceration and human rights.

So taken together, Democratic party control over the White House, an increasingly liberal popular culture, and an expanding wave of radical, grass-roots social movements have left White Male Heteronormativity feeling challenged and diminished.

The symbols of American power and national identity — from the Obama family in the White House to Colin Kaepernick protesting the National Anthem — have been usurped by people the Founding Fathers would not have recognized as fully human, let alone capable of citizenship.

This singular issue — Whiteness and American National Identity — offers the best explanation for why the right wing opposition to Obama dressed up in revolutionary war garb and called itself the Tea Party Patriots.

Donald Trump first staggered into presidential politics by promoting the racist conspiracy theory that Obama was born in Kenya into the Mainstream. By pointing to Obama’s race (and without saying it) Trump and the Tea Party sought to strip the President of his legitimacy, to deny the legality of his election based upon the crime of his race.

During the primaries, Trump took up this white nationalist base and conquered the Republican party. White supremacist or white nationalists, defined as those who claim a white identity as biological evidence of racially superior blood, bodies and civilization, have formed the core of Trump supporters from the start. With the selection of Steve Bannon of Breitbart news, Trump invited the Alt-Right to take over and direct his campaign.

In fact, the single leading indicator of support for Trump is to ask if you think Obama is a Secret Muslim.

While 54% of Republican voters think Obama is a Muslim, some 74% of Trump supporters think the President is a Muslim. 76% of Trump voters also support his ban on Muslim immigration and denying entry to Syrian refugees. Thus is it no joke when Trump supporters talk about deporting the President.

Of course when Hillary pointed this out, putting half of Trump supporters into “a basket of deplorables,” that same liberal media forced her to apologize for the generalization. This despite the documentable fact that she underestimated the basic sociological facts. She is expected to adhere to the basic rule of politics: you can insult a candidate, but never insult the voters, especially if those voters are white. Trump can call Mexicans rapists, tell African Americans they live in Hell and demand that good Muslims report on bad Muslims, and never have to apologize for insulting “the voters.”

Make no mistake, white racial resentment is one of the leading factors driving this election. And that this resentment — this sense of loss, or mourning on the white right, this sense of “being strangers in their own land,” is overdetermined, meaning that it has more than one cause.

We are familiar with the fact that in the nation’s elementary schools, white children are now a minority. That in California, white people are no longer a demographic majority. And we know that one day in the early 2040s a brown baby will be born in Oakland or Atlanta or San Antonio and white people will no longer be a majority in the United States.

We can also see, if we care to, that red-state white America has been suffering disproportionately since the start of the Great Recession. A startling survey, reported in 2015, revealed that older white American men are dying off at an alarming rate. This demographic, virtually alone in the overdeveloped world, seems to be dying off in increasing numbers. Due to unprecedented rates of suicides, drug addiction, alcoholism and overdoses, the life expectancy of white men has declined by nearly four years since the 1990s. No wonder Trump supporters speak in such apocalyptic terms, because for millions of older white men, their world is literally ending.

But demographic shifts are not enough. The end of a white demographic majority does not mean the end of white supremacy. After all, this is exactly what Trump’s electoral campaign stands to prove. Minority white power governed Apartheid South Africa and Colonial India for centuries. White minorities rule in many post-colonial nations today. Nothing says it can’t happen here.

White supremacy will neither end on its own nor will it end quietly.

As always, the work falls to us. We need to make overt bigotry shameful again and to hold Trump and his supporters accountable. We must defeat this movement at the ballot box, and defeat it in such large numbers that Donald J. Trump will be forced to recognize the outcome.

But even if Hillary wins, even if the Democrats take the Senate, and even if they take the House, white grievance and patriarchal authority will not disappear simply just because its loudest champion loses an election.

White supremacy may yet prove to be more durable than our democracy.

Nonetheless we are faced with a real choice, between continuing the all too slow progress of the past years and elect Hillary Clinton to the Presidency, or an explicitly revanchist re-embrace of white supremacy. This election is a difference between the messy processes of democratic governance and the authoritarian dynamism of Fascism which threatens to realign our rights along exclusionary racial lines.

During the second debate, Trump complained that he was being interrupted by the moderators — a white woman and a gay white man — calling them unfair several times. Yet after the debate, the clock had Trump and Clinton speaking for nearly equal time. Which shows us something about white male privilege and what the future of our politics is going to look like. For someone used to a life of advantage and privilege, egalitarianism and equal treatment feels like an injustice, like something is being unfairly taken away.

It’s not about facts, it’s a feeling. And that is why Trump is impervious to fact checking, impervious to scandals, impervious to accusation. Trump’s campaign is evidence that whiteness remains entrenched in our political culture, and why Trump has damaged our Democracy for decades to come, even if he loses.

This is what we are up against, not just a single candidate, but against the fictions of white supremacy itself. We cannot win this fight in a single election, but we can most certainly lose it.

Nothing less than this is at stake on November 8th.

Donald Trump and the Fall of Whiteness was originally published in Secret History of America on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Essays from the Political Playground 2016

The 2016 Election is approaching and we are all obsessed and appalled, deeply engaged and sick of this crap. But most importantly, we will not stay silent. As young voters — some voting for the first time — it is our turn now to step up and have our say, to make an intervention, to tune our voices to a political key and broadcast our ideas to the world.

For many of us, this is our first presidential vote. For the country as a whole, this is arguably the most divisive election in US history since 1860. How are we — without a long personal experience of electoral politics — to come to terms with the chaos, the alienation and the opportunity of this collective electoral decision?

Our answer is by writing, to use our words in an effort to reach and remake the world.

We seek to write beyond the classroom, to reach out to readers everywhere and open up the space of political speech and political education. We write from a space of learning, from a space of serious play, of trying to experiment with the impact of our voices and the significance of our arguments.

We aim to write in defiance of expectations, if only because any public political conversation is so wrapped in self-diminishing expectations: expectations of Berkeley liberal partisanship, expectations that we will represent the voice of Millennials, expectations that students are apathetic about politics, expectations that young voters are either cynical or naive.

We write from a liminal space between polish and ignorance, between ideology and apathy. Our effort is to be serious without being self-important, committed without being self-righteous. We stand between the random person on the street and the professional pundit, between the 3am Twitterstorm and the primetime CNN panel of partisan experts.

And as it turns out, there is lots of room between those two dominant positions of political discourse around this election.

What we are offering are new perspectives from engaged young people, using a social media platform to express ourselves in the name of understanding our world and pressing the political and cultural conversation forward. The world is changing, and we aim to write ourselves into it.

We hope you will join us.

Adam Iscoe

Valerie Pacheco

Sally Littlefield

Anthony Gilmore

Hayley Carter

Kristen Wilson

Elisabeth Larson

Rosemarie Alejandrino

Hunter Gettelfinger

Michael Mark Cohen

We are a collection of American Studies students (and one professor) from the University of California at Berkeley

#OUR TURN NOW was originally published in Secret History of America on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Essays from the Political Playground 2016

The 2016 Election is approaching and we are all obsessed and appalled, deeply engaged and sick of this crap. But most importantly, we will not stay silent. As young voters — some voting for the first time — it is our turn now to step up and have our say, to make an intervention, to tune our voices to a political key and broadcast our ideas to the world.

For many of us, this is our first presidential vote. For the country as a whole, this is arguably the most divisive election in US history since 1860. How are we — without a long personal experience of electoral politics — to come to terms with the chaos, the alienation and the opportunity of this collective electoral decision?

Our answer is by writing, to use our words in an effort to reach and remake the world.

We seek to write beyond the classroom, to reach out to readers everywhere and open up the space of political speech and political education. We write from a space of learning, from a space of serious play, of trying to experiment with the impact of our voices and the significance of our arguments.

We aim to write in defiance of expectations, if only because any public political conversation is so wrapped in self-diminishing expectations: expectations of Berkeley liberal partisanship, expectations that we will represent the voice of Millennials, expectations that students are apathetic about politics, expectations that young voters are either cynical or naive.

We write from a liminal space between polish and ignorance, between ideology and apathy. Our effort is to be serious without being self-important, committed without being self-righteous. We stand between the random person on the street and the professional pundit, between the 3am Twitterstorm and the primetime CNN panel of partisan experts.

And as it turns out, there is lots of room between those two dominant positions of political discourse around this election.

What we are offering are new perspectives from engaged young people, using a social media platform to express ourselves in the name of understanding our world and pressing the political and cultural conversation forward. The world is changing, and we aim to write ourselves into it.

We hope you will join us.

Adam Iscoe

VALERIE PACHECO

Sally Littlefield

ANTHONY GILMORE

HAYLEY ANNE CARTER

Kristen Wilson

Elisabeth Larson

Rosemarie Alejandrino

Hunter Gettelfinger

Michael Mark Cohen

p.s. Thanks to Madison Kahn and Matt Higginson at Medium for their help and suggestions!

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 18TH at NOON
SAVIO STEPS on SPROUL PLAZA
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY

In the interests of public education for an educated public, the students and faculty of the University of California at Berkeley will be holding the nation’s first Trump Teach-In.

The event is open to the public and will be held on Tuesday, October 18th starting at noon on the Mario Savio Steps of Sproul Plaza on the campus of UC Berkeley.

This date marks three weeks to day before the most consequential and unprecedented Presidential election in generations. Not only because the nation stands ready to elect the first woman to the nation’s highest office, but because of the rise of Donald J. Trump as the Republican Party’s nominee.

Trump’s campaign has split the Republican party, driven deeper the political divide inside the United States and raised the specter of American fascism. By now it is unmistakable that Trump’s campaign has been fueled by a sharp rise in racism and bigotry, sexism and misogyny, xenophobia and Islamophobia, Alt-right white supremacy and anti-Semitism, exhortations to physical violence, repeated promises to jail his political opponent, and now videotaped evidence of Mr. Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women.

So what is to be done about a problem like Donald J. Trump?

While listing Trump’s faults and insults is easy, understanding what his campaign means, and what is at stake for our democracy, is a far more important and challenging question. The Trump Teach-In aims to address this larger issue directly.

The faculty speakers for the event are organized around six topics: Immigration, Islamophobia, Women & Gender, Whiteness & Masculinity, Law & Order, and Democracy. The following faculty members have already agreed to speak (and more may still be added):

Prof. Leti Volpp from Boalt Law School.
Prof. Hatem Bazian from Ethnic Studies and Near Eastern Studies
Prof. Juana María Rodríguez from Gender & Women’s Studies
Prof. Michael Mark Cohen from American Studies
Prof. Nikki Jones from African American Studies
Sasha Abramsky from the Nation Magazine & Prof. at UC Davis

The purpose of this event is to foster student voter education about the perils posed by Trump and what he represents for our university, our communities and our country. Youth voter turnout is more important this year than ever before. At the same time, this is UC Berkeley’s largest first year class ever, thousands of whom will be voting for the first time. More of these students than ever are from out of state, and many will be voting in their home districts and possibly in battleground states. Too few students are currently taking classes that can discuss the election directly or have professors who are politically engaged and willing to talk about the election in class. So while California may not face a contested presidential outcome, student voter education is nonetheless an all important part of what public education at Berkeley can and should be.

We encourage everyone to come out on October 18th to Sproul Plaza and exercise your rights to free speech, free assembly, and free inquiry. If you cannot come to our event, consider organizing a Trump Teach-In on your home campus. Most importantly, please exercise your right to vote on November 8th.

Sincerely,

Michael Mark Cohen, UC Berkeley faculty member
Marandah Field-Elliot, UC Berkeley student and ASUC Senator

TRUMP TEACH-IN was originally published in Secret History of America on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.