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Jeet Heer Profile picture
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25 Jun, 8 tweets, 3 min read
1. The American right's turn against the military (as "woke" and beholden to CRT) is a pretty significant development, not without precedent & very specifically focused on officer class, but still something new & pregnant with meaning.
2. To be very specific, the focus of the right's ire is on the military leadership. This is what I'd call the Rambo trope: "the troops are good, they want to win, it's the goddamn pencil neck bureaucrats in the Pentagon that are the problem."
3. The Rambo trope all precedes Rambo of course: you see it in Dixiecrat attacks on desegregation of military and in Joseph McCarthy's attack on George Marshall & (suicidally) his attempt to red bait the Pentagon.
4. It's precisely because the right sees as the military as one of their institutions, something they have possessive ownership of, that they need to police it for ideological & personnel conformity. That's the hidden logic (apologies to @lionel_trolling) of Dreyfus affair.
5. Desegregating the military was controversial because the right (committed to open racism at that point) thought the military belonged to him. Same with fight over open gays in military. Same now: right things military is their property so it can't be woke.
6. Beyond the right's anxiety of losing control of institution they see as their own, there's other sources of rift: military resistance to Trump's psycho commands & coup attempts, officer class being college educated, general ranks being disproportionately POC.
7. The most worrying factor is resentment at Milley & top ranks for their unwillingness to obey Trump as he pushed for martial law. This was crucial for the failure of his coup attempts. The goal now is to cow military so they will be more obedient to GOP POTUS in future.
8. Defeated armies and movements think hard about causes of defeat. Right now the hard right is a defeated movement. They're thinking about what went wrong and realizing they need to cow the military. More here: jeetheer.substack.com/p/the-right-ve…

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More from @HeerJeet

Jeet Heer Profile picture
25 Jun
1. One of the big differences between Canada & the USA is the relative salience of Indigenous issues. Canada has considerably more Indigenous per capita (especially if you consider only continental USA) & issues of treaty rights are more prominent.
2. In general, Indigenous concerns (history, culture, politics) more prominent in Canada & also just in social life (i.e. city I live in is nearly 10% First Nations or Metis). But I think American situation is changing and will soon change in big way.
3. The uncovering of mass graves & unmarked graves near former residential schools in Canada is spurring on similar research in USA. Deb Haaland being Interior Secretary is a big factor. newrepublic.com/article/162821…
Read 5 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
24 Jun
1. The threat of the insurrectionist right remains real. Yet this clip, on a network Trump has appeared on, shows the limits of a counter-terrorism approach. This isn't a hidden network; it's an out-in-the-open political movement advocating violence.
2. As in 1850s, the threat of insurrection is coming from within the system, from people who have positions of power, wealth & status in the existing order. That makes it a threat of a different order & kind than, say, 9/11 or even the Oklahoma bombing.
3. As far as I can tell, the existing counter-terrorism models all posit threats from outside the system, from extremists on the fringe rather than extremists who have their own TV network, a former president egging them on, etc.
Read 4 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
23 Jun
1. This is in fact the typical coalition of right-wing mobilization: elite defense of status quo allying with vulgar anger: the snobs & the slobs. In 1920 Lothrop Stoddard writing tomes while other rougher Klansmen did the lynchings: led to 1924 immigration act among others.
2. One sees the snobs & slobs alliance in McCarthyism, with roughneck Tailgunner Joe providing the popular touch while Wilmoore Kendall & William F. Buckley (and even, sadly Sidney Hook) providing a high-brow rational for red baiting.
3. As I mentioned the other day, anti-CRT movement has this component, with both a very explicitly racialist base stirring up shit & a very organized think tank/dark money infrastructure pushing it into respectable form of GOP bills.
Read 6 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
22 Jun
1. In 1974 violence broke out Kanawha County, West Virginia over comparative religion textbooks. Fundamentalist parents dynamited a school building among other acts of violence. Then the Heritage Foundation stepped in & offered legal defense for the alleged dynamiters.
2. The Kanawha County textbook wars of 1974 are a direct precursor to the anti-CRT struggles today. While political battles over schooling are immemorial, the specific model of 1974 (agitated parents, right-wing think tanks proving organizing) started in 1974.
3. Heritage Foundation has taken the lead in organizing anti-CRT for the same reason they intervened in text book wars of 1974: school battles are a good way to recruit grassroots into movement conservatism.
Read 5 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
21 Jun
1. This twitter thread from yesterday is already a classic, one of the all time greats. It also raises an interesting question: how do conservatives reconcile their exaltation of ancient Greece & Rome (where same-sex practices were accepted) with their homophobia?
2. One way to reconcile celebrations of ancients with homophobia is to recontextualize ancient relationships in way Peg does. Harmodius and Aristogeiton weren't gay, they were just close male friends, liked to do some camping & wrestling, oil each other up, nothing to see here.
3. Another form of recontextualizing is pseudo-history. I remember an evangelical Christian telling me once that all the gay stuff started only in the late, decadent period decline, that when Rome was a young Republic they were all as straight as a rod.
Read 12 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
20 Jun
1. William Randolph Hearst is of course remembered as a pioneering press baron, a patron of the arts, the prototype of Charles Foster Kane, a failed politician etc. But his role in this history of the American right, has, I think been forgotten.
2. Hearst was the Rupert Murdoch of his time, but had a broader reach than Murdoch now has because it transcended narrow party differences and went beyond politics to culture (with his vast press empire having a hand in everything from cartoons to movies)
3. The interesting thing about Hearst is that he was a pioneer of both left & right populism, first using anti-systems politics to attack wealthy elites & then turning it against the New Deal. This was both a cultural & a political agenda.
Read 5 tweets

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