Monica Prasad, Northwestern University
Julian Go, University of Chicago
Daniel Immerwahr, Northwestern University
Katrina Quisumbing King, Northwestern University
Yannick Coenders, Northwestern University
Luna Vincent, Northwestern University
Perdana P. Roswaldy, Northwestern University
Alya Guseva, Boston University
In the finest traditions of science papers, I would like to report a gigantic conflict of interest in writing about the war in Ukraine. I was born and grew up in Kharkiv, Ukraine, a city of 1.5 million people, and received my undergraduate degree at Kharkiv State University. I have family and friends in Kharkiv, many of whom have fled since the start of the war, but some are remaining in the city, including my 80-year-old father. My heart is broken. My country is being relentlessly destroyed: tens of thousands of civilians are feared dead, including hundreds of children, and several hundred more children are severely injured. Millions are traumatized. Volnovakha, a small town of 20 thousand people in the Donetsk region is completely gone, 90% of Mariupol, a beautiful city on the sea of Azov with a prewar population of half a million people, has been encircled and mercilessly bombed by Russian artillery. It now lies in ruins. Hundreds or thousands of its residents, including orphaned children, were illegally deported to Russia, and about 100,000 people are still trapped inside the city. The Russian army has shelled residential buildings with people huddling in basements, as well as theaters, schools, hospitals, parks, lines of people waiting to get humanitarian aid, and private cars and evacuation buses trying to get people to safety. Russian soldiers raped, tortured and murdered civilians, including children, and plundered their belongings. The legacy of Soviet soldiers as liberators, heavily promoted for several generations after WWII, has been firmly replaced by the Russian soldier the invader and the looter.
More than a quarter of Ukraine’s prewar population have left their homes (11 million people, by UN estimates), and about half of them made it abroad, mainly to Europe. According to UNICEF, this includes two thirds of the 7.5 million Ukrainian children. The loss of life and the destruction of cities and towns are heartbreaking, but equally tragic are the cultural losses, the brain drain, and the blatant robbery of Ukraine’s future.
However, there is a silver lining. Ukraine has never been more united than now. The level of solidarity is astounding, and the support for President Zelensky, the Ukrainian army and the Ukrainian language is at its highest. You may have heard that one of the stated goals of this “special operation” as the Russian propaganda machine insists on calling this war, was to protect Russian-speakers in Ukraine, who were supposedly oppressed. I grew up speaking Russian in a predominantly Russian-speaking city. We were taught Ukrainian in secondary school, but not well enough for anyone I know to be fully fluent. Today, many if not most of my Russian-speaking friends from secondary school and the university embrace Ukrainian: they post on social media in Ukrainian, and some made a conscious choice to switch to Ukrainian in their day-to-day lives. But, notably, the mayor of Kharkiv, Ihor Terekhov, who was also born and grew up in Kharkiv, continues to speak Russian. And right before the start of the war, President Zelensky encouraged him to speak Russian and not be ashamed of that. Zelensky himself switched to Russian when he addressed Terekhov at a meeting in Kharkiv: “We knowthat in Kharkiv, many speak Russian, but they nevertheless think in Ukrainian, in a pro- Ukrainian way.”
The European Union and the proverbial West dubbed “weak” and “divided” by the Russian propaganda have demonstrated both the resolve and the ability to unite on many issues, including sanctions, weaning themselves from Russian gas and oil, providing military and humanitarian help to Ukraine, and welcoming millions of Ukrainian refugees. In the ever politically polarized United States, the public support for aiding Ukraine, including militarily, is bi- partisan.
In fact, this is the biggest irony of this war: Russia is achieving the exact opposite of what Russia wanted from it. A widely publicized document entitled “What Russia Should Do with Ukraine,” published by Kremlin-controlled RIA News, explained the ideological grounds and goals for the ongoing war: denazification and demilitarization of Ukraine. Upon a close read, it becomes clear that what was meant by “denazification” was actually de-Ukrainization – – stripping Ukraine of its national identify, culture, language and history, no doubt in line with Putin’s own claim that Ukraine is nothing but an artificial make-believe formation, essentially populated by ethnic Russians, which have been pressured by the West to become anti-Russian (“anti-Russia” is literally what the Kremlin spokesperson Peskov called Ukraine in a recent interview with Christiane Amanpour). De-Ukrainianization is not a new idea: the Russian state has orchestrated more than 300 years’ worth of these efforts, starting with Peter the Great’s 1720 decree to ban printing in the Ukrainian language and seize Ukrainian church books, and Catherine the Great’s move to ban teaching in Ukrainian in Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, followed by the closings of Ukrainian-language schools, persecution of Ukrainian language and culture. The Soviet regime continued in the same vein but amplified the brutality. Millions of ordinary Ukrainians died in 1932-33 as a result of the state- orchestrated famine of the Holodomor. And a generation of Ukrainian poets, writers and artists, part of Ukraine’s Executed Renaissance, perished at the hands of state repressive apparatus, their creative work destroyed or censored and their legacy completely erased for decades. (No wonder I grew up not speaking Ukrainian).
If the stated goals of Putin’s regime were to de- Ukrainianize and to de-militarize, which is to weaken Ukraine militarily, what is it actually achieving? Lifelong Russian speakers in Ukraine are abandoning the Russian language in favor of Ukrainian, and Russian culture is suffering a backlash not only in Ukraine, but worldwide. The Ukrainian National Academic Theater of Russian Drama named after a famous Ukrainian writer Lesya Ukrainka in Kyiv, the premier Ukrainian theater founded in 1926 where all performances were in Russian, was recently renamed the Lesya Ukrainka National Academic Theater, and its first resumed performances after the start of the war were in Ukrainian. Russian grocery stores, Russian restaurants and Russian math schools in the US are, too, being renamed. And even the Russian Boston Facebook group is no longer Russian, but “international”. Some may decry this as evidence of Russophobia — the knee-jerk cancelling of all things Russian. Yet I cannot help but wonder whether these name changes are more than justified. The very fact that these schools, stores and restaurants were called “Russian” while their founders hailed from Ukraine and Moldova, and sold and served food from Poland, Georgia and Armenia, reflected a particular imperial worldview, not unlike the use of “Russian studies” in the academy as a catchall label for all things Slavic, East European or post-communist.
The goal of demilitarizing Ukraine is looking more and more like the demilitarization of Russia. Once considered the world’s second most powerful military, the Russian army turned out to be all glitz but little substance, a Potemkin village that is much better at staging military parades than actual fighting (The Pentagon recently reported that Russia already lost a quarter of its combat power). Some of the Russian army’s substandard performance can be attributed to massive corruption: while Russia’s annual military budget is reported to be slightly over $60 billion, it may be that only a small part of it actually reaches its intended purpose, the rest is paying for mansions and yachts for top military personnel. And thanks to the bravery and spirit of the Ukrainian army that destroyed a large part of Russia’s military equipment as well as the steady supply of foreign military supplies, Ukraine may now have more tanks on the ground than Russia.
One other goal of the war in Ukraine, which was publicly stated by Putin and eagerly repeated by both Russian TV talking heads and ordinary Russians on the street, was to protect Russia from being closed in by NATO. Here too, what Russia is achieving is exactly the opposite of what it wanted, as Sweden and Finland, with whom Russia shares the 830-mile-long border, have expressed their desire to join the Western military alliance.
All wars eventually come to an end. How or when this war will stop is the most important question on everyone’s mind. Until recently, a common call was for the war to end at the diplomatic table, but after the world found out about the Russian army’s atrocities in Bucha, the tune has changed to “this war can only end on the battlefield.” “Ukraine must win” declares Anne Applebaum in the Atlantic, echoing the refrain repeated by journalists and politicians alike. The changed mood is also reflected in an increased international military aid to Ukraine, which for the first time since the start of the war includes heavy artillery and military aircraft to enable Ukraine to go on the offensive. There is also news that the negotiations have stalled. Meanwhile, the Russian army is regrouping in the east, preparing for a battle over Donbass. The Russian regime fixated on the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany, is under pressure to “deliver” Russia’s victory by this year’s May 9th military parade. Anything less than that would make Putin look foolish and weak. What will Russia try to accomplish next, and what will it try to pass as “victory” to save face? One thing is clear: because the language the Russian elites understand best is that of power, diplomatic negotiations will not be successful unless Russia is significantly weakened militarily and/or economically to the point where the bargaining is no longer about the Ukrainian land, on which Russia has made unreasonable demands, but Russia’s own economic survival. Not “war will end once Ukraine agrees to lay down arms and give up its territories,” but “some sanctions will be lifted once Russia withdraws its troops and agrees to reparations.” The question is what price Ukraine and its allies are willing to pay to get to this point.
Andrew Buck, University of Southern Indiana
Jeffrey Hass, University of Richmond
If Twitter is a valid representation of academic discourse on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, then journalists, military scholars, and some economists and political scientists are go-to experts for insights. What can sociology add? The Russian invasion seems up our alley (states, organized conflict, political identities, transformations creative and destructive). Comparative-historical sociology (“CHS”) tends to explore broader social contexts and histories that channel proximal institutions and actors (e.g. Moore 1966). Without long-term forces that created nations and states, bureaucratic militaries, and economies, we would not have capacities for such violence. Y et historical analyses of institutional and structural evolution, and comparisons that reveal significance, can seem too broad or distant to help make sense of conflict here and now. If this is a valid worry, it also sells us short. CHS provides key tools for making sense of the Ukrainian tragedy. One lesson is to make regimes and coalitions more important to analyses—not as individual psychologies in particular institutional positions, but as concrete networks and groups with access to capital and coercive power of the state (Buck and Hass 2018).
CHS brought states back into the picture, which informed analyses in political sociology and political science about economic development, revolutions, political change, and other subjects (e.g. Haggard 1990; Skocpol 1979; Tilly 1992; Markoff 1996). As some form of democracy and markets spread across Europe and the globe in the 1990s, most sociologists turned their attention to global economic and political structures that compelled regimes to follow neoliberal and quasi-democratic policies. Globalization was driven by digital technologies and dominant trans-national organizations (the IMF and World Bank, multinational corporations, the US government). With the global economy as a (supposedly) homogenizing field, and the global polity presumed to follow (echoing thoughts before World War I), differences between countries became more about conflicts of interests and positions in the new global order, rather than varieties of regimes. If anything, forces of globalization and interdependency would mean regime differences would wash out.
Such scholarship produced important insights. Yet this says too little about proximal forces that contribute to reproduction, transformation, or catastrophe. We can accept that “leadership,” personal qualities of leaders, matters; but this hides social forces that facilitate, hinder, or reveal those qualities. We should follow the late Richard Lachmann (2000) to explore how social groups (especially elites, classes, and movements) interact: the nature of relations and resources they have. As Tilly argues in his work about democratization (2003), the trick is to measure variation in coercion, capital, and coalitions. Given coercion and capital, how do coalitions crystalize into regimes that can use or reshape the distribution of capital and coercion?
Coercion and capital
Let’s start with coercion and capital. According to Tilly (1992), some states achieve high capacity through coercion; others orient to capital, using trade to achieve high capacity. Historically, Slavic countries of the USSR were weak on capital and heavy on coercion (a bureaucratic military and internal police). In the 1990s, post-Soviet Russia let its military degrade, as was evident in both Chechen wars; Russian victory was possible only by razing Grozny, terrifying local populations, and installing a local dictator. After 2007, Putin’s regime increasingly asserted its reliance on coercion vis-à-vis capital in subsequent conflicts in Georgia, Crimea, Donbass, and Syria. In terms of capital under Putin, leaders of finance and profitable industries (“oligarchs”) received special treatment and access to the corridors of power. Oil and gas production remained important, although prices were near record lows in the 1990s. After de-privatizing large parts of the hydrocarbon industries and coercing oligarchs to pay more taxes, Putin’s regime began to see benefits of its growing control and increases in hydrocarbon prices, which improved Russia’s trade balances and state budget, facilitating massive reserves (much now frozen abroad) and possibilities for military and economic investment.
Ukraine, for its part, lost much coercive capacity after giving up its nuclear weapons in 1994. Ukraine no longer has easy hydrocarbon profits; institutional instability meant oligarchy and corruption. Ukraine has been among the poorest parts of Europe since 1991, without profitable exports to buoy its regime. The regime’s capital became increasingly tied to the country’s geographic position as a transportation corridor of pipelines from Russia to Europe. After the humiliation of losing Crimea and the Donbass in 2014, the Ukrainian government has invested in its military, including imposing military service. Ukraine also made overtures to enter NATO’s sphere of influence and perhaps gain membership. At the same time, post-Euromaidan Ukraine has improved trade with Europe and lessened its dependency on Russia. These planned and ongoing attempts to improve the Ukrainian state’s capacity and regime’s freedom of movement were part of Putin’s pretext to invade and “de-militarize” Ukraine.
If we focus on coercion and capital, we see that Russia had more resources at its disposal, and, even if these were less impressive in the reality of war, Russia still could bring much more to bear. Much like its historical predecessors of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, Putin’s regime abandoned the “free-trade” route to achieve high state capacity and relied on coercion again using military incursions into neighboring countries and threatening Europe with its natural resources. That is, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reflects the ability of Putin’s regime to threaten wider conflict with nuclear weapons and to turn off oil and gas supplies. Yet this “just-so” story elides two important questions: 1) Why did Putin decide to go to war, and 2) Why have Russia’s efforts at pursuing war—both in the field and in presenting their case—been so problematic to the point of incompetence and tragedy. We suggest the reason lies in coalitional histories, which channeled decisions and practices in different directions.
Coalitions
Hiding under all of this are the coalitions that ran these countries and who made the choices about whether and how to invest in remaking the state. Coalitions have social bases of different elites, classes, movements and outside actors. Immediately after the fall of the USSR, Russia and Ukraine both had fragile coalitions of competing political and economic elites that could swing regimes from one direction to another. Their regimes were riven by factionalism that made it hard for the state to do much, from successfully implementing reforms (beyond destroying the old) to collecting taxes. Putin and his coalition emerged as a reaction to the instability of 1990s offering to bring order to society. The goal from the beginning of Putin’s regime was not to have a single party state, but, according to one architect of Putinism(Pavlovsky 2014), a “one and a half party state” with formal trappings of democracy. Representatives of an opposition could complain, but never enough to make a serious change. This set-up has been remarkably stable. Putin remained in power for over 20 years, through five American presidents and five British prime ministers. Despite the instability of 1990s, the Kremlin has not had a transfer of power to an opposition since the fall of the communism. Y et what made this coalition successful also undercut its advantages of coercion and capital.
Initially, the Putin coalition was not homogenous. He came to power with the support of oligarchs, technocratic reformers, and fellow siloviki (security forces, literally a “power elite”). This initial coalitional structure was not static, and before long a coalitional structure emerged that, for all members’ differences in specific policies, shared a dirigiste approach to economic reform (Hass 2011). A market economy was not negative, but markets had to serve the state. And so those in the coalition who would not play by these new rules were purged, first when Putin and siloviki turned on some oligarchs (especially Mikhail Khodorkovskii).
Over time, Russia’s ruling coalition transformed, siloviki in the core and technocrats and others in an outer circle. Putin and siloviki invested in internal coercion under democratic façades (e.g. “managed” elections), from laws against dissent,to organizational expansion. Since 2014, Putin augmented the siloviki: giving more legal and financial means to the FSB and Federal Protective Service (akin to the Secret Service) and creating a praetorian guard (Rosgvardia). This had key effects. First, as the coalitional structure shifted from competing elites to an inner circle on the same page, Putin has worried less about dissent. Second, Putin was not initially a dictator; he became a dictator as the coalitional structure narrowed, raising his degrees of freedom. Third, thinning discourse at the top denied Putin counter-arguments against preconceived notions; siloviki increasingly told Putin what he wanted to hear, unlike earlier, when reformers might advise Putin to be more moderate to gain legitimacy or foreign investment. Additionally, managed democracy reduced open discourse that could signal problems and compel policy innovations. Finally, one consistent trait of Putin’s regime issystemic corruption that led some to label Russia a “kleptocracy” (Dawisha 2014). Much capital theoretically available for coercion, it seems, did not find its way into proclaimed investments, including the military, as Russian setbacks in Ukraine reveal: immense logistical errors, low- quality resources, and absence of newer- generation weapons suggest coercion lost out to corrupt capital flight. Tilly (1985) was more correct than he realized: state-making really can be like organized crime.
The contrast with coalitions in Ukraine is revealing. Successful popular mobilizations against corruption occurred twice while Putin’s ruling coalition narrowed and consolidated power. If Putin’s regime sometimes had to negotiate with oligarchs, they shaped popular mobilization via repression and co-optation. By contrast, confrontation in Ukraine between movements and competing elites during elections led to significant shifts in the structure and direction of the regime. The contentious politics of the Orange Revolution led to new presidential elections when opposition protests showed systematic corruption of the first results. After new elections in 2005 forced out the original (disputed) winner, continued swings between elites from western and eastern Ukraine came to a head in the dramatic, contentious events of 2013-2014 (Euromaidan), which forced president Yanukovich to flee Ukraine and destroyed the pro-Russian coalition. Even though goals of movements were not fully realized, confrontation forced elites to expand coalitions—just as Putin’s regime did the opposite. New coalitions that allowed open politics strengthened a sense of Ukrainian nationhood and popular buy-in facilitating mobilization against Russia; coalitions that facilitated closer ties with NATO and the EU meant more weapons to fight Russia.
The tools of CHS regarding states, organized violence, elites, and movements reveal how Russian versus Ukrainian regimes were going in different directions. An analysis of regimes offers a perspective on this conflict situated between globalization and the decisions of leaders in institutions. Recognizing underlying drivers of regimes—coercion, capital, and coalitions—reminds us that even if leaders change and global integration resumes, structural forces still shape regimes. Even among critics of globalization, few predicted in 1991 that democratization and marketization of Ukraine and Russia would lead to war between them thirty years later. Would war had been averted with different leaders? Most likely, yes, but Ukrainian, Russian, and global leaders still have to confront what faces these regimes after war: bureaucracies for coercion, hydrocarbon inheritance, and building coalitions.
References
Buck, Andrew and Jeffrey Hass. 2018. “Coalitional Configurations: A Structural Analysis of Democratization in the Former Soviet Union.” Demokratizatsiya 26/1: 25-54.
Dawisha, Karen. 2014. Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? New York: Simon & Schuster.
Haggard, Stephan. 1990. Pathways from the Periphery. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Hass, Jeffrey K. 2011. To the Undiscovered Country: Power, Culture, and Economic Change in Russia, 1988-2008. New York: Routledge.
Lachmann, Richard. 2000. Capitalists in Spite of Themselves. New York: Oxford University Press.
Markoff, John. 1996. The Abolition of Feudalism. University Park: Penn State Press.
Moore, Barrington. 1966. The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Boston: Beacon Press.
Pavlovsky, Gleb. 2014. “Interview.” New Left Review 88 (July/August): 57-58.
Skocpol, Theda. 1979. States and Social Revolutions. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Tilly, Charles. 1985. “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime.” Pp. 169-191 in Bringing the State Back In, edited by Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Tilly, Charles. 1992. Coercion, Capital, and European States. Cambridge: Blackwell.
Tilly, Charles. 2003. Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650-2000. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Tim Gill, University of Tennessee
I’m honored that I was asked to share a reflection on Richard Lachmann. There are so many aspects of Richard’s life and work that I cannot speak to, and I wouldn’t claim the ability to do so. There are no doubt countless others who knew him far more deeply than I ever would have. I only knew Richard for a few short years, but his presence made an impact on my life.
As a junior scholar and a postdoc on the job market in 2016, I was incredibly nervous about anything I published or put out on the Internet. One of the first items I published in a purely public sociology outlet included a few posts on our section’s defunct blog Policy Trajectories.
In the wake of Trump’s election, I published a piece on the role that neoliberal policies might play in the new administration’s policy program. To my surprise, Richard Lachmann responded. He disagreed with some of my thoughts, but we had a courteous exchange. It wasn’t a small thing to me. It made me feel validated. I didn’t feel like anyone at all. But here was a prominent scholar taking me seriously and engaging me as an equal.
Since that time, Richard and I began exchanging emails about scholarly work, joking and talking about films and TV over Facebook, and meeting up at conferences. Over the course of our friendship, Richard and I continuously discussed the nature and future of U.S. Empire. That was the primary thread that bound our work and thoughts together. We agreed on many things but disagreed on others. At all times, I truly felt comfortable expressing all my thoughts on these issues with him, without the threat that he might act unkind or pompous or otherwise.
It wasn’t just the scholarly conversations that I will remember him for.
The last time I saw Richard was at an ASA pre- conference in Brooklyn in August 2019 just before the pandemic. We talked a little bit about our classes and teaching political sociology, but we mostly just spoke about my young son, parenting, and raising a family.
Richard was surely an intellectual titan, but he was also a genuinely human person. His willingness to engage with me, read my work, and write letters of recommendation for me has meant very much. But his friendship and seeming desire to know me as a person has meant so much, too.
Many of us have countless stories of folks looking at our badges at conferences – maybe as a grad student, postdoc, or faculty, and clearly having little interest in talking with us. Richard was the exact opposite of this disposition. I honestly had nothing beyond conversation to offer him. I couldn’t provide him with any opportunities or grant-funding or anything of the sort. But it didn’t matter.
As I engage with my own students and other graduate students and faculty now as a professor, I will always remember Richard for the kindness he showed unto me at an early stage in my career. We only shared a small amount of time together in the few years we knew each other, but it was a critical moment in my life – becoming a new parent and working through the job market. Richard was there for me, and I’ll never forget him.
Rebecca Jean Emigh, UCLA
I was deeply saddened by Richard’s untimely death. When he died, we (with David McCourt) were working on editing a new Oxford Handbook of Comparative and Historical Sociology. During the pandemic, in one of our many zoom meetings, we were exchanging anxieties about catching the novel disease, and Richard joked that at his age he was more likely to die of a heart attack than COVID. Little did we know at that time that would turn out to be true. On Saturday, September 18, just hours before Richard died on the 19th, we had been emailing back and forth about details of the handbook, as is typical with academics engrossed in a new project. We were surprised when he didn’t respond to our emails by Monday, and when one of our colleagues emailed us asking if he was dead, we were shocked. Richard was always very much alive! How could he be dead? As a memorial, I want to remember Richard Lachmann as great on multiple levels! I’m going to run with a multiscalar alliterative scheme: remembering Richard as great with three “g’s”: genuine (personal), generous (collegial), and genius (scholarly).
As a person, Richard was genuine. I first met Richard when I was a graduate student, and we were both working on the debates surrounding the historical rise of capitalism. He was an assistant professor at Madison Wisconsin, and I was a graduate student at The University of Chicago. He struck me immediately as someone completely without pretense, interested in a genuine exchange of ideas, even with a graduate student, clearly his junior, with only half-baked thoughts to offer him in response to his knowledge and well worked out theory. Many years later, we happened to have published our histories of “how we became comparative and historical sociologists” in the same issue of the ASA Comparative and Historical Sociology Newsletter (2007, 18[2]:32‒36). We had very different backgrounds. When Richard claimed in his article he lacked sophistication as a graduate student, I remember thinking that he had orders of magnitude more than I did! Indeed, Richard was genuinely interested in everyone, connecting with them where they were at.
Richard and I met often over the years, despite living on opposite sides of the country. Richard was genuinely kind and thoughtful. He enjoyed real conversations about real topics. He loved to have a meal and discuss topics both serious and heavy. We had meals at ASA conferences, when I visited his home city, and when he visited mine. The conversation ranged from travel to politics to theater to family to sociology. When asked his opinion, he gave it, unfiltered. But it was always genuinely thoughtful and measured. What is more surprising about this demeanor, however, is that he held very strong opinions and views, and he was not easily (ever!) swayed. Yet, he could deliver these ideas in a personable way. In addition, he responded to his critics, while holding fast to his approach. Once, he told me how he had collected entirely new evidence for a piece, because “the reviewers were right about that.” In fact, Richard and I disagreed fundamentally about the sociological role of elites and nonelites in social life. At an epistemological level, I am convinced that elite theory is misleading, at it focuses its methodological sight on elites, thus blinding itself to the role of nonelite actors. Once, when we were still young, I asked him about what some certain piece of historical evidence implied for our theories. I remember objecting that, in contradiction to his explanation, Florentine elites did transform economic relations, and it was in fact capitalist relations themselves that led to their undoing in Tuscany. He calmly went on to give his view of what the bit of evidence might imply for our respective approaches. I was amazed. He could summarize how his theory might be wrong, what it might mean for a revision of his work, but also reviewed the same points about mine. It was honest, respectful, and above all, genuine.
As a collaborator, Richard was generous. I was on multiple projects with Richard, including panels and edited volumes. Richard always contributed generously. He answered every email, in a deep and meaningful way. Near the beginning of one such project, when the lead editor was trying to get things up and going, the emails were flying fast and furious. Very few of them made any sense. I was a bit puzzled as to how to respond, what to say, or what to add. I think most of the other participants were too, as their responses were equally unfocused and unhelpful. But then I saw Richard’s responses. They were pointed and specific, moving the project along with real substantive points. He could read through what others had written, take the points, and weave them together into some guidelines that we could implement to create a coherent work. He built genuine consensus through his generosity. Richard was always dependable. I could count on him to get things done. So could everyone else.
Thus, my experience with Richard’s generosity was hardly unique. Richard had many colleagues and collaborators. He was also particularly active in fostering interest among up-and- coming scholars of comparative and historical sociology, and he avidly participated in the mentoring program of the ASA-CHS section. Richard was there to the very end of such meetings. How many times did I speak with someone who said, “Oh yes, Richard was very helpful!” He sparked their interest in the topic, especially with the way that he could link the historical material to contemporary social issues. At the ASA and SSHA meetings, Richard was always listening to paper sessions, participating in the business and network meetings, and in between, meeting with colleagues and drawing in new members.
As a scholar, Richard was genius. His work presents the best developed contemporary elite theory, drawing on and synthesizing classic elite theories as he updated and tightened his version of it. He consistently worked out this approach throughout his entire career, applying it to multiple different empirical cases. As a consequence, Richard’s work was always comparative and historical. His major works usually traced the historical trajectories of several regions/nation states. This breadth was impressive, especially in comparison to many other works in this field that take either the historical or comparative approach. This breadth is quite difficult to accomplish in this sort of work, as it is painstakingly slow to gather evidence and learn enough detail about the cases to write them with facility.
Richard theorized that the alliances among elites was the key to understanding social trajectories. Where elites can consolidate and unify, they can grab power. Once they have power, they can transform economies, politics, and societies.Thus, Richard’s work, like mine, honed in on the real actions and relations among social participants. Richard’s insistence, however, was on how elites, not classes or any other nonelites, were key to understanding how transformations occurred. Thus, he carved out a unique space for political sociology: capitalist accumulation cycles could not explain social transformations. Nor could class mobilization, class inequality, class consciousness, or, indeed any other aspect of class, explain such transformations. Even more generally, neither could any aspect of nonelite relations.
His theory was also particularly elegant: the same theory could explain transformations (e.g., how capitalism developed) as well as nontransformations (e.g., where capitalism failed to develop). For example, in his work on the rise of capitalism, he examined the successful case of Britain, as well as the unsuccessful cases of France, Spain, the Netherlands, and Tuscany. This is, to a large extent, because the same mechanisms explain both the successful and unsuccessful cases. Elites must first consolidate and unify and then they must transform social relations. If both conditions occur, then dramatic social change occurs. If they do not both occur, then no such change occurs. He also used this theory to explain entire social trajectories, that is, the rise and fall of a social formation. For example, in his work on empires, he examined Spain, France, the Netherlands, Britain, and the United States, and explaining why some of the empires lasted longer than others by examining elite conflict. The theory explains both the rise and fall, again, because Richard theorized that they are governed, at least to a large extent, on the same mechanism. If elites did consolidate and transform relations, they were loath to give up their power, so they then tended to lose out in competition with elites in other locations who were not entrenched. Thus, it was the consolidation of US financial elites politically that explained both the rise and fall of US hegemonic power.
The sweep of the work empirically and theoretically is genius. And I say this as someone who does not share Richard’s approach. My quibbles would be, to name a few, his focus on elites that largely fails to take nonelites seriously, his political sociological approach that mostly ignores culture and economy, his a-temporal application of theories, and his universalization of European cases. But I am probably wrong, and more importantly, I wish Richard were still here to tell me so, in his great—genuine, generous, and genius—way.
A.K.M. Skarpelis, Berlin Social Science Center (WZB)
Obituaries are micro-narratives that set out to do several things at once: they revere, they mourn, they reminisce. Befitting to Richard Lachmann’s standing in the field and his importance in his home department at the University at Albany, SUNY, obituaries about Richard’s life and work have appeared in several venues. In many of these, his doctoral students – often international students, with few family networks in the United States – mentioned how exceptionally kind and welcoming he was to them, how he made them feel at home in a foreign country and advocated for them freely and generously. Within comparative historical sociology more generally, my peers andsenpai have related how they would meet with him around the big conferences; how he would take hours out of his time to read and discuss their papers, from first draft to full book manuscript. This magnanimity of spirit and time and attention is rare in the field.
A first stab at posthumous biography, obituaries are a public expression of grief that is usually written by family, close colleagues, or famous scholars in the field. As an ordinary junior sociologist, I fall into none of these three categories. Why then contribute to this memorialization of Richard Lachmann? What I found striking alongside testimonies of his own students and the looser networks within comparative historical sociology, and the reason why I felt compelled to write, is that in many ways, Richard’s influence extends far beyond these immediate circles in ways unusual for the field: His presence was calming and generative all at once. I remember the first time I gave an ASA talk in front of an actual and large audience– almost a hundred people – and how I scanned the room, nervously, looking for something, a reference point, a calming landmark. At some point I spotted Richard Lachmann, just sitting there with that permanently smiling expression and friendly face we all recall so well. Immediately, my mind stopped racing and I felt ready to speak.
Richard was an exceptional person in this ability to inspire and motivate by his mere presence. When I somewhat embarrassedly related this memory to my writing group and other colleagues, several in the group – none of whom were advised by Richard, or even knew him very well – shared almost identical feelings. Of a calming presence, of the courage to talk, unbothered by the constant swirl of questions and doubts facing especially scholars working on non-US cases (how is this sociological?,” “How does it matter to the US?”). Richard’s existence in the field has made countless of us feel at ease, confident and – dare I even put it this way – joyous in our pursuit of knowledge, in our taking apart of power relations and analogical reasoning beyond the West. Obituaries as genre are ephemeral; Richard’s influence is not. We will miss you, Richard, but you left us with the greatest gift: With a manual on how to proceed as mentor, colleague and friend, with kindness, impeccable reasoning, and generosity.
Mabel Berezin, Cornell University
In late 2016 in response to the widespread media narrative that linked Trump to Brexit and an array of European populists, I wrote a short essay entitled, “Trump isn’t a European-style populist: That’s our problem”, in which I argued that the comparison between Trump and his supposed European counterparts was flawed. For the most part, European populists are career politicians who deploy a standard nationalist script to address any number of political issues. Their predictability as well as commitment to their national political institutions was their strength as well as their weakness. In contrast, Trump questioned the legitimacy of political institutions from the courts to the electoral system and denied the reality of facts. The essay concluded that Trump’s unpredictability made him “profoundly dangerous” and pointed to a rocky road ahead for American democracy.
I did not imagine back then that “dangerous” would take the form of Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 Presidential election. I did not imagine an attack on the US Capitol building engineered from inside the White House that included the possible assassination of the Vice President. I envisioned milder transgressions than the ones that culminated in the failed coup of January 6. As Trump’s behavior became increasingly contemptuous of democratic practice and norms and his rhetoric more inflamed, the populist comparison lost salience. In its place, a growth industry in public commentary on fascism developed. Academics (for example, Snyder 2017; Stanley 2018; Finchelstein 2020; Ben- Ghiat 2020; Churchwell 2020) as well as public intellectuals became laser focused on Trump’s resemblance to a host of past and present unsavory political leaders with a weak attachment to democracy. In addition to analytic commentary, politicians and pundits deployed fascism as a political expletive. For example, after her speech at the Democratic National Convention, New York Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez argued that “stopping fascism in the United States. That is what Donald Trump represents” was the major point on the national political agenda.
Did Trump’s challenge to the 2020 election results and the willingness of his strongest followers not only to support this challenge but to commit seditious actions in support of them signal a fascist turn in American politics or merely an outlier event tied to Trump? Today, sequestered in Mar-a-Lago with loyalists and family around him, Trump appears to spend his time playing golf and plotting against Republican legislators who voted to impeach him. He no longer tweets about voter fraud because social media sites have banned him. Yet, his rambling two-hour CPAC speech on February 28 indicates that Trump has not given up on the “stolen election” lie or the dream of seeking office again. Trump’s apparent unwillingness to leave the public stage suggests that now is a propitious moment to ask if fascism is the correct focus to understand the political meaning and consequences of the last four years.
In Making the Fascist Self (Berezin 1997), I argued that Italian fascism was more than the sum of its numerous public spectacles. There are lessons from this European past. As comparative historical sociologists, it is our job to figure out which lessons are meaningful.
Fascism in its national variations is notoriously difficult to define, making it susceptible to epistemic plasticity. As a concept, fascism tends to act as a “bridging metaphor” (Alexander 2003) for evil, violence and authoritarian behavior—whether it be political, cultural or social. Fascism is “fascinating” as Susan Sontag observed and recent historyconfirms. Trump’s permanent campaign mode, his MAGA rallies and his complete disregard for governmental norms and practices evoke multiple dimensions of inter-war fascist politics and practice. The academic experts who have explored the similarities between Trumpian politics and the 1930s readily acknowledge that whatever Trump’s autocratic proclivities, we do not have a Fascist regime—the events of January 6 notwithstanding.
Benito Mussolini coined the term fascism to denote a collectivist system of government. Giovanni Gentile, an Italian philosopher and Mussolini’s Minister of Education, laid out the details for this new theory in an academic article in Foreign Affairs (1928). Fascism aspired to community and coherence—to eliminating the boundary between the state and the individual. Liberalism with its soulless individualism was as much its enemy as Marxism. Trumpism with its affinity for isolationism, free trade, and antipathy to government regulation makes no common cause with collectivisms—no matter what form they take.
Trump is a showman–not a talented politician. Any astute politician—especially an aspiring autocrat, should have recognized the opportunity for power consolidation and electoral success that the COVID-19 pandemic afforded. The virus was democratic. Everyone was at risk. Even a half-hearted attempt to control the virus in March would have whittled away, if not erased, Biden’s margin of victory. Trump’s own pollster told him that citizens’ primary interest was the virus and urged Trump to focus his campaign energies there (Dawsey 2021). Trump did not listen. Trump turned a vehicle of political unification into one of polarization. His initial denial, rants against science and the “China” virus, and pitting states against states eventually assured his electoral defeat.
Dead loved ones coupled with lost wages proved more politically persuasive than angry tweets and MAGA rallies. Biden got this point. His inaugural team recognized the opportunity that COVID-19 offered to stage a public display of national cohesion to counter the polarization that plagued American politics for the last four years. On the eve of Biden’s inauguration, buildings in D.C. were lit to commemorate the lives lost to COVID-19. Biden and Harris and their spouses stood at the Washington Monument to participate in a moment of silence. At 5:30 pm, all Americans had the opportunity to participate in a moment of silence across the United States and church bells rang in ‘a national moment of unity andremembrance’ to commemorate the dead. Political ritual unifies as well as repels. The Tuesday evening commemoration unified, in contrast to the Jan. 6 insurrection that repelled. Biden and his team staged a political spectacle of unity. They understood that grief and tears are more powerful than the spectacle of disruption, anger and blood. In short, the period between November 6 and January 20 revealed that Trump lost on multiple levels while still managing to do much damage during his four years in office.
The debate over whether or not Trump is a fascist rings alarm bells but hides more than it reveals about the illiberal tendencies in contemporary American politics. Trump’s Presidency and the 2020 election is a Rorschach test that reveals all the fissures embedded in the landscape of American democracy.
First, our institutions held—but often, barely. The last four years have shown how elastic they are. Who knew that the head of the General Services Administration had the power to hold up a Presidential transition or that the operations of the post-office could interfere with ballots? If Trump had been a slightly more rational person, how far could William Barr have pushed his vision of the unitary executive? Second, Trump encouraged and gave new legitimacy to networks of paramilitary “patriots” who use armed intervention and violence in local and national politics when they dislike the outcome of standard political practices. Paramilitary groups are not new. They have existed on the margins and in rural areas. Trump invited them in and they will not leave as he did. Today a group of Proud Boys is as likely to show up on the steps of state capitols as they recently did in Oregon, as in some minor protest in a rural backwater. Charlottesville was the beginning, not the end, of a new genre of organized racism.
Third, the developing idea that we dodged a bullet this time but there is a smarter more efficient Trump on the horizon has traction. Josh Hawley, the conservative Republican senator from Missouri, was the name that frequently came up on Trump 2.0 lists until he tried to stop the certification of the election results on January 6. But this is an open question. Hawley has not disappeared and there surely are other Hawleys out there.
To begin an analysis of Trump that extends beyond the cult of personality we have only to look at the 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference [CPAC]. Founded in 1974, Ronald Reagan was its first keynote speaker. CPAC is the voice of America’s ultraconservative Republicans. In 2021, Donald Trump was the keynote speaker for a conference whose themewas “American Uncancelled.” Three days of Trump adoration led up to the former President’s keynote address. No one at CPAC seemed to mind that Trump had asked followers to invade the United States’ Capitol a mere month before or that he was under investigation for all sorts of business fraud in the Southern District Court of New York. The principal takeaway from Trump’s talk was that he was not abandoning his claim that the election was stolen from him. Claiming that “we won in a landslide,” Trump questioned the integrity of the Supreme Court that did not have the “guts to challenge” the election results. A second point was that Trump defined Trumpism as “great deals.” The straw poll taken before Trump’s speech revealed that 62% of CPAC attendees saw election integrity as a major issue; 97%liked Trump’s policy agenda; and 68% would be happy to see Trump as a candidate again.
Historian and legal scholar Samuel Moyn’s New York Review article, “The Trouble with Comparisons” (2020) argues that locating Trump’s election in the politics of the 1930s obscures more than it reveals and deflects public attention from our real problems. I too have questioned the analytic utility of the term fascism (Berezin 2019) to address our current moment. Yet, that does not mean we should be complacent. If Europe in the 1930s is not the best comparison point for the United States today, then we have to take on the challenging question of what an appropriate comparison would be. In contrast to the United States today, democracy was not deeply rooted in the countries that succumbed to fascist rule in the past. Trump and Trumpism has revealed a willingness on the part of leaders and citizens to chip away at the institutions, norms and values of our long established, if sometimes flawed, democracy. Trump told us that democracy did not matter and 74 million persons, not all of whom were fledgling fascists, were not sufficiently concerned to vote against him.
The failure to value democracy rather than the desire to embrace fascism is the greatest danger that Trump posed and continues to pose. The consequences of this undervaluation are ongoing. European fascism ended badly for all. Biden’s administration should give priority to the restoration of the belief in civic virtue and practice that affirms democracy in all its iterations as our core value. As comparative historical sociologists and citizens, we need to look for the correct comparisons. Our future as a democracy depends as much on our academic work as our public political practices.
References
Alexander, Jeffrey. 2003. “The Social Construction of Moral Universals.” Pp. 11-84 in The Meanings of Social Life. NY: Oxford .
Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. 2020. Strongmen. NY: WW Norton.
Berezin, Mabel. 2019. “Fascism and Populism: Are They Useful Categories for Comparative Sociological Analysis?” Annual Review of Sociology 45(1):345–61.
Berezin, Mabel. 1997. Making the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of Inter-war Italy. Ithaca: Cornell.
Sarah Churchwell. 2020. “The Return of American Fascism.” New Statesman. https://www.newstatesman.com/int ernational/places/2020/09/return-american- fascism
Dawsey, Josh. 2021. “Poor Handling of Virus Cost Trump His Reelection, Campaign Autopsy Finds.” Washington Post (February 1).
Finchelstein, Federico. 2020. A History of Fascist Lies. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Gentile, Giovanni. 1928. “The Philosophic Basis of Fascism.” Foreign Affairs 6: 290-304
Moyn, Samuel. 2020. “The Trouble With Comparisons.” New York Review of Books (May 19).
Snyder, Timothy. 2017. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. NY: Duggan Books
Stanley, Jason. 2018. How Fascism Works. NY: Random House.
Robert M. Fishman, Carlos III University, Madrid
The near-death experience of American democracy during the Trump presidency holds extraordinary significance for all who care about the principles of equality and freedom, but also in a rather more specific way for scholars who seek to understand patterns of similarity and difference between countries in their historical trajectories of change. The recent assault on democratic norms and procedures in the United States put in place both parallels, or points of convergence, and elements of divergence between American politics and the public life of a number of polities elsewhere that previously confronted the challenge of antidemocratic movements and parties. This juxtaposition of points of convergence and divergence, along with several crucial elements of fundamental singularity in the American institutional basis for democracy, have contributed to making the American case rather difficult to understand for those lacking case knowledge. However, at a deeper level, the points of contrast and similarity between the American experience with Trump and European experiences with antidemocratic movements – or at a minimum with ademocratic politicians – can be seen as reflective of two underlying commonalities: (1) the powerful linkage between battles over the boundaries of inclusion in the polity and struggles over the fate of democracy itself; (2) the important cultural components of such battles, and of the dynamics shaping major points of inflection in the political system. Europe, like the United States, has been subject to deep and polarizing cultural conflicts over the boundaries of inclusion within democratic polities. Although such battles are often taken as normal fare within democratic systems, the triumph of exclusion can, at worst, fundamentally undermine the democratic order.
I suggest four basic lessons of the broad pattern of similarities and contrasts between the United States and Europe in the recent travails of democratic politics: (1) The fundamental importance, for democracy’s fate, of struggles over the boundaries of inclusion; (2) the cultural dimension of such battles with their focus on unwritten assumptions, forms of discourse and shifting types of practice; (3) the juxtaposition of certain cross-case shared elements with other nationally specific components of how democracies confront the challenge raised by forces of exclusion; (4) certain distinctively American elements of the recent near-death experience of democracy in the United States. In what follows, I briefly address all of these themes, beginning with components of the American experience that are especially difficult to comprehend for many Europeans who are unfamiliar with specificities of American history and institutional form.
Several elements of American distinctiveness that have come into clear view in the events of the last four years – and especially in struggles over the 2020 election – have contributed to the difficulty of understanding American politics fully for those lacking a great deal of case knowledge, whether of a scholarly or simply a practical sort. The enormous range of variation in election procedures across governmental jurisdictions in the United States quite obviously stands in strong contrast to the prevalence of national standards and procedures in Europe. The guidelines shaping electoral participation in the United States vary not only by state but also by county in so many ways that “uninitiated” observers – especially outside the United States – can easily find the empirical substance of the case to be quite confusing. But in a more consequential sense, the rooting of American electoral practice in what should be thought of as a pre-democratic Constitution (Dahl, 2001) that has been adapted to democracy – without fully expunging its pre- democratic components – underpins numerous elements of the story of the 2020 election that are difficult to fully understand without a short course in American politics. Prior to the events of January 6, 2021, Trump’s efforts to stretch the anti-democratic misuse of constitutional provisions on state involvement in the designation of electors well beyond recent precedent had already clearly established the magnitude of this recent challenge to democracy. In that sense, distinctive American components of the story point to a national disadvantage in the defense of democracy, but fortunately that disadvantage has been outweighed by other case-specific factors that have strengthened the American defense of democracy. Some features of all national histories in the struggle for democracy are at least partially distinctive, but many other factors are shared by most if not all cases.
An unmistakable lesson of the Trumpian challenge to American democracy is indeed shared with many other cases: Struggles over the bounds of inclusion – or to put the matter slightly differently, conflicts about efforts to read large numbers of citizens out of the legitimate borders of political life – impinge on essentially all elements of democratic life. Those battles often find expression in laws and regulations, but at their core they are cultural conflicts that involve often unstated assumptions and many informal types of practice. Cultural conflicts over inclusion constantly interact with major distributional struggles and essentially all other elements of democratic life, configuring the “playing field” on which political competition takes place. Although it is often both analytically and empirically useful to differentiate between different dimensions of democracy (Fishman, 2016), the way the bounds of inclusion are drawn in a democratic polity holds strong implications for all meaningful dimensions of a democracy’s existence. Rhetoric that demonizes immigrants, those born to them, and racial and religious minorities has led to systemic political consequences extending well beyond the control of the border and the behavior of police. The discourse of exclusion has promoted not only limitations on voting rights, but also actions impinging on the very viability of a system based on the free expression of citizen preferences.
Among the types of severe damage inflicted by recent flagrant efforts at exclusion is the destruction of underlying cultural grounds for mutual tolerance between political adversaries – a crucial precondition for successful democracy in the classic formulation of Robert Dahl (1971). I argue that the recent growth within the Republican Party of both direct disloyalty to democracy and what Juan Linz’s pioneering formulation would conceptualize as causally crucial “semiloyalty” (Linz, 1978), has its antecedents in longstanding struggles over the breadth of inclusion. The Trumpian effort to aggressively reverse earlier triumphs of inclusion has involved a considerable intensification of the antidemocratic potential of efforts at exclusion. The specific institutional forms taken by exclusion vary over time in the American case and between country cases, but tendencies to exclude large numbers of citizens from full rights in the system – typically rooted in a narrow and extreme version of ethno- national identity – have at their core a pervasive effort to define a country’s purported “national essence” in a way that excludes many from effective citizenship. Sociological scholarship on the cultural construction of both the national essence (Berezin, 2009) and the meaning of democracy (Fishman, 2019) has elucidated the importance of national histories for the country- specific contours of such struggles and their implications for democracy. The bounds of inclusion are reflected not only in legislation on voting rights but also in much else, including institutional practices regarding demonstrations and other forms of expression. Comparative analysis suggests how and why some country cases manage to achieve relative consensus in favor of inclusion whereas others do not (Fishman, 2019).
Cultural and political struggles over the bounds of inclusion in the polity – and in that sense over much of the substance of democracy – have assumed great importance in the United States and Europe in recent years. These struggles take on their nationally specific features, embedded in references to specific histories, but at the same time, they have much in common. This dimension of American democracy’s near-death experience is inescapable, but the significance of cultural conflicts over unwritten assumptions regarding inclusion has not been limited to the Trump years, or to the United States. Just as the United States has long been subject to efforts of the far-right to exclude large groups from full citizenship on the basis of race, religion or ideology, so too have many European polities suffered from de facto attempts to place large segments of their citizenry outside the bounds of recognized and legitimate political life.
Although many Europeans view Trump as a curiously and almost unintelligibly American anomaly, in fact his challenge to inclusion – and to basic norms of tolerance – have strong parallels in Europe. Crucially, those parallels are to be found not only in the antidemocratic far right but also among other political forces. In the Spanish case, mainstream political actors on the center right – and even some closer to the center of the ideological spectrum – have supported proposed changes to the electoral system that would leave distinctively Basque parties without representation in the most important parliamentary body in Madrid, thereby drastically undercutting the ability of Spain’s representative democracy to successfully incorporate national minorities such Basques and Catalans. In political conflicts over the largest of Spain’s nationally distinctive regions, Catalonia, the exclusionary understandings of a major tradition in mainstream Spanish politics have badly complicated potential pathways to the solution of the Catalan problem within the Spanish state, creating severe strains for Spanish democracy (Fishman, 2019; chapter 6).
During the Trump presidency – and especially in its waning days – the United States appears to have come closer to a full breakdown of representative democratic politics than at any other point in the modern era, thus transforming the country’s politics in a fashion that holds points in common with the grim history of periodic democratic failure experienced by a number of continental European polities such as Spain, Portugal, Germany, Italy and others. But many of the elements of near breakdown in American democracy have been substantially different from those experienced by European democracies. The small far-right militias and extremist groups of the January 6 attack on the Capitol in Washington look far different from the typically more coordinated and unified forces of the European far-right in episodes of democratic collapse or near breakdown. If we focus instead on hyper-nationalism, as opposed to democracy’s fate as such, the US never gave a majority of the popular vote to the standard- bearer of extreme nationalism, whereas that has been the case in several European instances, including the triumph of Brexit in the UK and several cases of right-wing populist success in Eastern Europe. Both in the twentieth century’s interwar period and in the recent instances of hyper-nationalist assaults on democratic or liberal principles, the forces of anti-democratic nationalism have been crucially, even if only marginally, weaker in the United States than in many other polities.
The inability of the Trumpian far-right to win more than 46.9% of the national vote even at what, as of now, stands as its electoral high- water mark in the 2020 election (surpassing Trump’s 2016 popular vote in both absolute numbers and percent, albeit obviously not in the Electoral College thanks to the increased unity of the forces of inclusion in 2020), places the American case in an interesting comparative light. Trump’s increase in support should be understood through the lens provided by extensive scholarly work that demonstrates the considerable advantage conferred by presidential incumbency – a factor that would be expected to increase Trump’s electorate in his 2020 campaign from the White House. The now classic model of political scientist Steven Rosenstone estimates the magnitude of the incumbent effect as a full 8% in added votes for an occupant of the White House seeking reelection (Rosenstone, 1983). One crucial component of the American story concerns the country’s (growing) demographic diversity and the way in which competing political forces have framed that underlying reality either as the basis for inclusion or exclusion. However, another fundamental question involves the resolve of those who favor the principle of inclusion to unify around the strongest defender of that principle. A crucial difference between the elections of 2016 and 2020 concerned precisely that question – the degree of unity achieved by the political forces favoring a politics of inclusion. The explanation for outcomes such as this one, that is 2020’s increased unity of pro-inclusion forces in support of the Democratic nominee, are often to be found in the movements of relatively small pieces of the electorate. In the American case, that involves the role of suburbanites and of specific religiously-defined groups such as liberal Protestants and Catholics, along with many other segments of the national electorate. The extraordinarily complex constellation of factors shaping electoral outcomes in the United States held huge systemic implications in the election of 2020 – as will remain the case in the aftermath of that historic election.
References
Berezin, Mabel. 2009. Illiberal Politics in Neoliberal Times: Culture, Security and Populism in the New Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Dahl, Robert. 1971. Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Dahl, Robert. 2001. How Democratic Is the American Constitution? New Haven: Yale University Press.
Fishman, Robert M. 2016. “Rethinking Dimensions of Democracy for Empirical Analysis: Authenticity, Quality, Depth and Consolidation.” Annual Review of Political Science 19: 289-309.
Fishman, Robert M. 2019. Democratic Practice: Origins of the Iberian Divide in Political Inclusion. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Linz, Juan, 1978. The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Crisis, Breakdown and Reequilibration. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Rosenstone, Steven. 1983. Forecasting Presidential Elections. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Philip Gorski, Yale University
At first glance, the protesters who gathered around the American Capitol on 6. January seemed to be a motley crew. One observer espied: “Preppy looking country club Republicans, well-dressed social conservatives, and white Evangelicals in Jesus caps…standing shoulder to shoulder with QAnon cultists, Second Amendment cosplay commandos, and doughy, hardcore white nationalists.” The symbolism on display also seemed like apples and oranges. One group erected a giant cross, another a wooden gallows. Someone in the crowd waved a “Jesus Saves” banner, while another sported a “Camp Auschwitz” hoodie.
On closer inspection though, the picture gets murkier, the lines harder to draw. Christians waved Trump flags. The neo-Fascist militia group known as the “Proud Boys” kneeled and prayed before plunging into the breach. Nor were such mixtures of Christian, nationalist and white supremacist symbols unusual. One man, decked out as a cosplay crusader, clutched a large leather Bible to his chest with skeleton gloves. What looked like apples and oranges turned out to be a fruit cocktail: White Christian Nationalism (WCN).
What is WCN?
WCN is, first of all, a story about America. In this story, America was “founded as a Christian nation.” It was founded by and for (white) Christians; and its laws and institutions are based on “Biblical” (i.e., Protestant) Christianity; or perhaps even breathed into the Founders’ ears by God, Himself. This much is certain though: America is divinely favored. Whence its enormous wealth and power. Divine blessings lead to national obligations. America has been entrusted with a sacred mission: to spread religion, freedom and civilization – by force, if necessary. Today, that mission is endangered by the growing influence and even the mere presence of non-Christians (also: non-whites) in America. White Christians must therefore “take back the culture” and also “the country.” Which are, after all, their rightful possessions. What White Christian Nationalists hear when Trump promises to “Make America Great Again”: “Make America Christian Again.” And, sotto voce, make it “White Again”, too.
WCN is not just a story. It is also a political vision, manifested in a set of “policy preferences.” Violence and retribution are central to that vision. As survey researchers such as Samuel Perry and Andrew Whitehead have shown, White Christian Nationalists tend to favor a strong military and capital punishment; they also strongly oppose gun control. Racial purity is also central to the vision. As Perry and Whitehead also show, WCN is strongly correlated with opposition to interracial marriage, non-white immigration and affirmative action. It’s not hard to see what’s white and nationalist about this vision. It’s more difficult to understand its roots in Christianity. Isn’t Christianity a religion of universal peaceand brotherhood?
To understand how American Christianity became entangled with racism and violence, we first have to trace it back to its Scriptural roots. Those roots are threefold. WCN is not just one story, but a combination of three. The first is a Promised Land story based on the Old Testament. The New England Puritans saw themselves as the heirs of the Biblical Israelites.They imagined themselves as a “chosen people, and they came to see the “new world” as their “Promised Land.” For a while, they thought the native peoples might be one of the “lost tribes” of Israel. But as their relationship with the natives shifted from curiosity to hostility, the Puritan settlers recast the Indians as “Canaanites” or “Amalekites”, who were occupying “their” Promised Land.
The second story is an End Times story based on the Book of Revelation. For much of Western history, most Christian theologians read that book in allegorical terms. The violent struggles it depicted between the forces of good and evil, they reasoned, actually represented the moral struggles that took place within the believer’s heart. But there were always some Christians who interpreted the text more literally, as a description of future events. Many Puritan radicals embraced such readings, and took them along to New England.
The two stories gradually fused together during the Puritans’ wars with the natives during the late 17th century. Puritan theologians such as Cotton Mather came to believe that the New World might be the central battlefield in the final struggle between good and evil foretold in Revelation. Needless to say, Mather placed himself and his Puritan brethren on the side of the good, and the Catholic French and their native allies on the side of evil. He and other Puritans likened the Indians to demons and depicted the Indian wars as blood sacrifices to an angry God. It was war — the violent struggle between the English and the French and the Indians that some historians now refer to as the “Second Hundred Years War” – that welded Protestantism and Englishness together in the New World.
But how did Protestantism and Englishness get entangled with whiteness? To answer that question, we need to shift our focus to the south, to that other seedbed of American culture: The Colony of Virginia. There, and elsewhere, the most common justification for the enslavement of kidnapped Indians and Africans was that they were “heathens.” But this argument broke down in the late 17th century as some enslaved persons converted to Christianity and some white Christians sought to evangelize them. The problem was initially resolved by shifting the legal basis of slavery from religion to color: “Blacks” could be slaves; “whites” could not. It was then more fully resolved by creating a new theological bases for slavery. Perhaps the most influential was the “Curse of Ham.” Blacks were the descendants of Noah’s son, Ham, the argument went, and their color and enslavement were a result of the curse that Noah had called down on head. This is the third story: The Racial Curse Story.
It would be another century before WCN became American. Until the American Revolution, most colonists still considered themselves British. It was only after the Revolution, that they began to think of themselves as “American.” Until that time, the term “Americans” was more often used to refer to the native peoples. So, one way that (white) Americans set themselves apart from their British “cousins” was by claiming to resemble (native) Americans. The American (man) was a little more savage, a little more violent, than his British forebears. He was, in a sense, the true heir of the Indian who was (supposedly) disappearing, and the true inhabitant of the “frontier.” The white American had a trace of the red American in him.
WCN is what linguist George Lakoff calls a “frame.” A frame is sort of like a bare-bones movie script. It “has roles (like a cast of characters), relations between the roles, and scenarios carried out by those playing the roles.” Like a movie, it can be made and remade, with new actors and modified scenarios. The “frontiersman” becomes an “Indian fighter” and then a “cowboy.” The scene shifts from Appalachia to Kentucky to Wyoming.
Or to Texas and California. There, new actors entered the scene. Some did so involuntarily. Former citizens of Mexico did not choose to become Americans. Others came freely. Though immigrants from China and Japan did not find the freedom they were promised. Instead, they were cast into roles they did not audition for: “savages” and “heathens” unfit for “freedom” or even “civilization.” As the scene of the action followed the “frontier” to the South and the West, the actors changed but the roles remained the same.
It was not until the “closing of the frontier” and the beginnings of empire, that the script fundamentally changed: White Protestant Nationalism was reborn as WASP imperialism. The revisions were as follows. First, as Catholics and Jews from Southern and Eastern Europe and Ireland were begrudgingly admitted into the charmed circle of whiteness, various shades of whiteness were distinguished: the whitest of the white were “Anglo-Saxons” (or, alternatively, “Nordics” or “Aryans.”) Second, the Promised Land became the Whole World. The motive was no longer conquest; it was “spreading freedom”, “civilization” and, of course, Christianity. All this as an act of benevolent “self-sacrifice.” Third, the End Times were indefinitely postponed. The Kingdom of God on earth would be achieved through the spread of Christian civilization – whether by peaceful or violent means.
The Spanish-American War of 1898 marked the beginning of WCN qua WASP Imperialism. By the end of the Cold War in 1989, WCN mutated yet again to become (White) Judaeo-Christian Imperialism. The parentheses around “white”reference the shift from the explicit white supremacism of the Jim Crow era to the “colorblind” racism of the post-Civil Rights Era. “Judaeo-Christian” gestures towards the “trifaith” vision of American pluralism that took root during World War II. “Imperialism” points towards the fundamental continuity that runs through 20th century American geopolitics: an empire of soldiers, missionaries and businessmen, but an empire all the same.
What really changed during the second half of the century was not so much the script as the scriptwriters. Since the Colonial Era, the dusty old script of WCN had been passed down from one generation of liberal Protestants to another: Congregationalists and Presbyterians, Episcopalians and even Unitarians. By the 1970s, though, they had abandoned WCN – and religion, too, in many cases. Liberal Protestants were becoming secular progressives. A rising phalanx of white evangelicals eagerly seized the torch. They began fiddling with the script. They brought back the original version of the End Times Story with its battles between good and evil and natural and supernatural forces. With the WASPs out of the way, they went back to good old plain white – which, they insisted, was no color at all. And while they remained firmly committed to American Empire qua military power, they expressed reservations about international institutions that might limit US “sovereignty.”
They had a good run but a short run. By the early aughts, they were losing control of the narrative”, as we now say. The problem was simple: the number of white Protestants was dwindling. They were no longer able to dominate the scene. Immigration and secularization were the cause. The presence of a Black family in the White House added insult to injury. The Financial Crisis of 2008 poured salt in the wound. The howls of pain from conservative white men in the American“heartland” were the loudest.
Enter Donald Trump, Golden Escalator, stage right. At first glance, he seemed an unlikely champion of WCN. But “Christian” had often been outvoted by “White” and “Nationalist” in the past, and the selection of Mike Pence made it unanimous. Trump’s Schmittian friend/enemy politics lined up easily enough with WCN’s good/evil frame. His sociopathic bloodlust and gladiatorial performativity stirred dormant phantasies of white male violence. And then there was his unapologetic and barely concealed racism. “The Blacks”, “The Mexicans”, “The Muslims” – Trump’s vision was the opposite of colorblind. And much as Trump loved “winning”, he was no fan of empire. That was for “losers and suckers.” In short, Trump preached an old-time religion of White Christian Nationalism.
There was just one problem: White Christian Nationalists could no longer muster a majority of the popular vote. They were saved by the Electoral College in 2016 – literally “saved”, they thought. But not in 2020. And surely not fairly? The lies of their “anointed” leader aside, how could they be losing control of “their” country? Trained to see hidden forces behind political events in “End Times 101”, they were quick to see them behind Trump’s loss, too. And if a “sacred election” were stolen from you, wouldn’t you try to “stop the steal”? So they tried. Unsuccessfully.
Where does this leave us?
I am told that the Chinese character for “crisis” combines the characters for “danger” and “opportunity.” The danger is obvious: the Republican Party has become an anti- democratic party prepared to use all available means to retake power. If they succeed, the experiment of American democracy, however imperfect, is over. The opportunity, too: to undertake a Second Reconstruction that will – finally – realize Martin Luther King’s vision of a “nation of nations, a people of peoples” or, more plainly, a multiracial democracy. It will require, not just a rewrite of the WCN script, but it’s consignment to the dustbin of history.
The essay is published at TRAJECTORIES (Spring 2021 – Special Issue)
Richard Lachmann, State University of New York
There are two main explanations for Trump’s 2016 victory and for his voters’ enduring loyalty. One sees his support as largely racist, a reaction by white voters against having been governed by a Black man for eight years and what many of them regard as repeated insults from privileged elites. The other focuses on Obama’s neoliberal policies, which led to atepid recovery from the 2008 financial collapse and the spectacle of massive bailouts for banks but not for mortgage holders or the unemployed combined with total impunity for the rich crooks who caused the crisis. Of course, in a nation with a huge electorate, both those motives along with others animated millions of voters. And we need to recognize that voter suppression, ubiquitous rightwing media outlets, and the bias of the Electoral College have been essential to give any Republican in this century a realistic chance of being elected president. (Gerrymandering and the concentration of Democratic voters in compact urban districts benefit Republicans in races for Congress and state legislatures.)
In 2020 Trump received eleven million more votes than he had in 2016, while Biden exceeded Hillary Clinton’s total by fifteen million. The depressing interpretation is that millions of new voters flocked to Trump despite his catastrophic failure to address the health or economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, his inability to ever reach 50% approval, and his ostentatious dishonesty, corruption, crudeness and debauchery. The glass half full view is that Biden’s 51.3% was the highest percentage a challenger to an incumbent president has received since FDR in 1932. And Trump was the first incumbent since Herbert Hoover to lose the presidency and both houses of Congress for his party in a single term.
Both perspectives get at essential realities of US politics today. It is incredibly hard to dethrone a president, so Biden’s victory reflects the electorate’s acknowledgement of Trump’s gross record of failure. Trump was the first president, again since Hoover, to end his term with a net loss of jobs. The GDP growth rate during Trump’s term was the lowest since Hoover’s. He failed to deliver on his 2016 promises of a vast infrastructure plan or to restore industrial jobs. His only significant legislative achievement, the 2017 tax cut bill, received negative approval ratings in every poll, a clear difference from the public reception of the Bush and Reagan tax cuts, and perhaps a sign of public recognition that Trump’s tax cuts, even more than Reagan’s and Bush’s, go almost entirely to the very rich and to corporations.
And yet…we need to remember that Trump’s economic failures, general ineptitude, and knack for hiring cranks and fools were compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic. I think it is almost certain that without the deus ex machina of a pandemic the economy would have been good enough, and Trump’s incompetence and callousness not blatant enough, to allow him to win an Electoral College victory even as he would have joined Bush in 2000 and himself in 2016 in winning the presidency while losing the popular vote. After all, if Trump had gotten 80,000 more votes in Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin, he would have tied Biden with 269 electoral votes for each, throwing the outcome to the House where Republicans hold a majority of states, and which would have given Trump the presidency. So the real question then becomes, how can we explain so many Americans’ modest expectations of their presidents?
Trump’s initial election and his enduring support from more than 40% of the electorate are grounded in a decades-long failure of presidents, and American government more broadly, to deliver benefits for ordinary people. Except for Obamacare, there has not been a single significant addition to social benefits since the Johnson administration. When Bill Clinton touted the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, which provides 12 weeks of unpaid leave, as one of his major achievements we were deep in the realm of the pathetic.
As has been endlessly reported, median income has stagnated since the 1970s. Life expectancy and educational attainment have plateaued in contrast to every other rich country and many much poorer ones. The system for paying for medical care has become ever more baroque and open to grifting even with Obamacare. Student debt has risen over $1 trillion in the past twenty years. At the same time, the ability of the rich to benefit from tax cuts, bailouts, subsidies, and contracts has become ever more open.
Republicans have been masterful at undermining confidence in the idea that elections can matter for anything other than packing courts and asserting the superiority of “real” Americans against the Democrats’ multiracial cosmopolitan coalition. Using the filibuster and other parliamentary mechanisms, Republicans have prevented Democratic presidents from delivering on their promises no matter how modest. Rightwing judges have blocked administrative measures. The US state relies much more than other wealthy nations on regulation and provisions in the tax code to deliver social benefits and to protect citizens. Such measures inevitably become ever more complex and open to manipulation by lobbyists who, unlike ordinary citizens, have the time and expertise (or money to hire experts) to manipulate agencies, including the IRS, to lock in special benefits and undermine broadly worded laws that proclaim the intention of guarding citizens’ health, safety, and ability to work and consume free from theft by their employers and the corporations from which they purchase goods and services.
Democrats in recent decades have been unambitious in their reform proposals. With the great exceptions of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, Democratic presidentialandidates in the post-Reagan era have mimicked Republicans and devoted their efforts to explaining why they couldn’t enact benefits citizens in other rich countries take for granted. Instead, they have invited voters to participate in “conversations” about race and poverty, discussions that they admit are intended to enlighten rather than to solve problems. (Biden, in response to Sanders’ challenge and in contrast to Clinton in 2016, offered surprisingly expansive proposals even as he evoked nostalgia for the supposedly golden Obama years.)
Voters get almost no help from journalists in understanding the complexities of government decisions or in seeing the implications of legislation and budgetary and administrative measures. Americans have little idea how the government spends money. Among the most extreme and enduring errors is the belief, revealed in poll after poll, decade after decade, that foreign aid makes up at least 20% of the federal budget (the real number is under 1%). Democratic presidents do little to clarify matters. Obama, in perhaps his worst act of political malpractice, never articulated the difference between his Recovery Act of 2009 and Bush’s bank bailout in late 2008.
All this understandably led many voters to yearn for a strongman who could “drain the swamp” (in Trump’s own words) and “knock heads together” (in someone else’s words). Trump issued a continuing stream of promises and boasts in his campaigns and during his presidency. Despite legacy newspapers’ and television networks’ escalating willingness to label Trump’s claims as lies, polls and interviews suggest that the 74 million who voted for Trump in November took his violent rhetoric as evidence of his willingness and success in confronting “special interests.” That term is vague enough to encompass both the billionaires that Trump claimed he knew and had the wealth and audacity to deny as well as China, immigrants, demanding minorities, and snooty coastal elites. In the absence of real knowledge about how government works, it became easy for Trump’s supporters to mistake inhuman measures against immigrants and violent rhetoric against China for real action against those and other targets.
President Biden and Congressional Democrats are giving clear indications that they have absorbed the lessons of the Clinton and Obama years. Only massive spending and dramatic reforms can cut through the miasma of misinformation and ignorance that allows so many voters to believe that the Republicans are the party of “ordinary people” or that there are no essential differences between the two parties and therefore they might as well go with the party that indulges their hatreds and puts up candidates who at least offer a good show. Warnock and Ossoff’s success in campaigning on the promise to deliver $2000 relief checks emboldened Democrats to refuse Republican “compromises” that would have reduced that amount or otherwise significantly cut the $1.9 trillion total of the new relief bill. If that measure is followed by further achievements such as a massive infrastructure bill oriented toward green energy, a $15 minimum wage, and strong regulatory measures that offer palpable protections to workers and consumers, then voters will be able to see clear differences between the two parties and will have the motivation to vote for Democrats at all levels in coming elections.
Democrats can’t count on media, even that produced by sympathetic journalists, to explain how those measures will impact ordinary Americans. Politicians will need to tout those accomplishments themselves again and again. The 2020 election demonstrates that even the most egregious failures and grossest behavior will not cost Republicans enough votes to ensure their defeat. Democrats need to produce dramatic programmatic achievements and to publicize those relentlessly. Otherwise, we will see a repeat of the 2010-16 election cycles. Republicans will be able to distort Democrats’accomplishments, a task made easier if those successes are meager or hidden in convoluted legislation. Unless and until voters see improvements in their lives, they will continue to blame an array of enemies that Republicans will vilify in colorful and violent language.
The dilemma Democrats face today is not unique to the US or to this moment. Left parties win support when they institute policies that deliver results that make real and legible differences in peoples’ lives. The more complex the programs, especially when they are not universal and have elaborate procedures for deciding who qualifies, the harder it is for voters to see those results and the easier it is to believe that someone else is benefitting at their expense. The target of resentment differs from country to country. In the US that someone else most often is seen as Black. Thus, the lack, or progressive weakening, of universal social benefits provides fuel to sustain old and animate new prejudices.
As unions weaken in most rich countries and media become ever more concentrated and open to rightwing manipulation, voters lose access to institutions that can explain the implications of electoral and legislative choices. Biden and the current Democratic Congressional majority, like their counterparts in other countries, can overcome those limitations only with clear and ambitious programs that deliver benefits that are impossible for the broad public to ignore and therefore difficult for Republicans to distort.
For comparative historical sociologists, the post-Trump era provides an interesting case to test our theories on how policy is made and how voters understand their choices. For those of us who live in first world democracies (however limited) and who would like the next generation to have that same option, the decisions elected officials and ordinary citizens make hold much more than academic interest.
The essay is published at TRAJECTORIES (Spring 2021 – Special Issue)