Matt McManus on why Trump's second term has been so crazy

Описание: It's now one year into Donald Trump's second presidential administration, and there is just as much of the same amount of chaos as we had the first time.

But the second administration has a lot more extreme policies, and a lot of those policies might seem random in many ways. The idea about seizing Greenland from Denmark, or the idea of burning down the NATO alliance. None of this seems to make any sense

it is terribly ironic that while Donald Trump himself has never read much of anything, if you've read a lot of right wing political theory and religious theology, you can actually understand a lot of what he's been up to.

And our guest on today's program, Matthew McManus, has done a lot of the reading in that regard.

He's a longtime friend of the show and also is a PR assistant professor at Spelman College, and we're gonna talk about how Trump and Trumpism fit into the bigger picture of fascism, authoritarianism, and right wing epistemology.


TIMECODES
00:00 — Introduction
05:54 — Non-religious anti-intellectualism in right-wing thought
09:34 — Nietzsche as the canonical far-right thinker
14:07 — Trump's domestic policies are basically the re-institution of serfdom
16:46 — The importance of sci-fi authors in anti-democratic political thought
23:25 — Utopias as political lodestars
27:36 — Horseshoe theory and its limitations
32:14 — The historic relationships between 20th century fascism, conservatism, and left-wing ideologies
37:36 — The folly of leftists who team up with reactionaries
41:36 — Conclusion


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