Reactionary Technopolitics: A Critical Sociohistorical Review

Sean Doody

doi:10.32855/fcapital.202001.009

Abstract

This paper outlines a critical social history of reactionary media, political, and information networks—what I refer to generally as technopolitics—in the United States and their significance to the hostility towards truth and fact that is a central feature of our political present. I begin with a critical review of the unique right-wing media and political ecosystem that emerged from the alliance between neoliberalism and social conservatism in the twentieth-century. In the second section, I focus on digitization, Trump, and the alt-right, and discuss the historical tethers connecting the latter to the cyber-libertarians and white supremacists operating on the early internet. Next, I take stock of the history covered in the paper, and argue that we can see three general sociopolitical tendencies emerging from our current juncture: something like a paleoconservative hardening of the Republican Party’s base; the degeneration of the core alt-right into white supremacist terrorism; and the rise of an “intellectualist” reactionary assemblage epitomized by the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW). I provide a brief analysis of the IDW and discuss its chief political and social significance in the post-Trump, post-alt-right social landscape of what Jodi Dean describes as communicative capitalism.

Highlights

For many observers, Trump’s steamrolling through the Republican Party establishment, his disregard for the institutionalized norms of political decorum, and his stunning defeat of Hillary Clinton seemingly came from nowhere, as if it were a “cataclysmic natural event we [were] powerless to prevent” (Kompridis 2006:247)
As the title of the symposium suggests, this cataclysm continues unfolding under Trumpian governance, a modality of rule highly abnormal for a representative democracy
The starting point for this inquiry was the premise that the assault on truth and fast capitalism fact taking place under Trumpian governance is an abnormal state of affairs for a democratic society, but that it must be situated within the broader social setting of a decline in symbolic efficiency (Dean 2010, 2019)

Summary

Introduction

Trump’s steamrolling through the Republican Party establishment, his disregard for the institutionalized norms of political decorum, and his stunning defeat of Hillary Clinton seemingly came from nowhere, as if it were a “cataclysmic natural event we [were] powerless to prevent” (Kompridis 2006:247). I begin by setting the historical stage with a review of how the antidemocratic political project of the neoliberals became intertwined with the popular right-wing reaction against the civil rights, women’s liberation, and anti-war movements What came of this was a political association where free market libertarians formed necessary and effective alliances with social conservatives that materialized as a web of critical, consciousness-shaping political institutions—think tanks, radio and television broadcasts, faux grassroots political organizations, and so on. As neoliberalism began radically altering social relations in the twilight of the twentieth century, a popular conservative resurgence was already underway that generated the conditions for a historic alliance of the political right— an alliance from which a general, antigovernment mobilizing ideology would emerge that would foster effective political collaborations among different rightist factions This alliance was rooted in the vehement reaction to the civil rights, anti-war, and women’s liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s. That Donald Trump has been able to proficiently exploit this vast ecosystem over the course of his presidential tenure and two campaigns—especially in a period of immense digital pandemonium

The Treacheries of Digitization

Conclusion