Aspirational Fascism: The Struggle for Multifaceted Democracy under Trumpism (Forerunners: Ideas First)

Coming to terms with a new period of uncertainty when it is still replete with possibilities

This quick and engaging study clearly lays out the United States’ current democratic crisis. Examining the early stages of the Nazi movement in Germany, William E. Connolly detects synergies with Donald Trump’s rhetorical style. Tapping into a sense of contemporary fragility, Aspirational Fascism pays particular attention to how conflicts between neoliberalism and the pluralizing left have placed the white working class in a bind. Ultimately, Connolly believes a multifaceted democracy constitutes the best antidote to aspirational fascism and rethinks what a politics of the left might look like today.

Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.
 

• In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (The Wellek Library Lectures)
• Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair (Thinking Out Loud (FUP))
• The Rhetorical Presidency: New Edition (Princeton Classics)
• Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When It's Gone
• Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming
• A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Forerunners: Ideas First)
• Climate Machines, Fascist Drives, and Truth
• The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump
• Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution (Zone / Near Futures)
• Political Theology of the Earth: Our Planetary Emergency and the Struggle for a New Public (Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture)