Exposing the Right and Fighting for Democracy: Celebrating Chip Berlet as Journalist and Scholar by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367681265
Google: JtVpzgEACAAJ
Goodreads: 57865081
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

Chip’s prescience had him identify the emerging Third Positionism’s connection with left-leaning movements, and put him at odds with LaRouchites, conspiracy theorists, and problematic types of black nationalists and anti-Zionists, but he did it with salvation in mind. In unpacking and defeating the logic of conspiracism, his reports gave people tools to restructure debate and validated the impulses that brought people into contested space in the first place.

Trumpism

As the world reeled from Trump’s victory in November 2016, I imagine that Chip responded patiently as he waited for the progressive Left to catch up to him. Chip long saw the Republican Party’s capacity for mobilizing white nationalist politics on a national scale.

Building on his work on nativism, producerism, and populism, Chip saw Trumpism’s rise based on the conditions of working people, particularly falling real wages, mixed with ideological interventions that portrayed “big government” as problematic.

While media outlets and scholars lamented how they got the 2016 election so wrong, Chip’s work traced a commonsense history of how the political Right opportunistically reframed attacks on the white working class to mobilize a reactionary radicalism that blamed all parties except for the one responsible. From early in his career looking at the Moral Majority and the New Right to the rural rage of Middle America in the 1980s, Chip has tried to understand how the anger of working people gets mobilized against them.

Chip clearly saw that something was on its way long before. In analyzing the Tea Party just a few years earlier, he drew on sociologist Arlie Hochschild to argue that the Tea Party’s “emotional” story, while often in contest with the facts, played on the trenchant feelings of loss permeating those in economic decline. He earned this understanding not just through dispassionate analysis but from his work as a journalist. As Chip wrote in Trumping Democracy

Attending a Patriot meeting is like having your cable-access channel video of a PTA meeting crossed with the audio from an old “Twilight Zone” television rerun. They are not clinically deranged, but their discourse is awash in paranoid-sounding conspiracy theories.30

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