One of Karl Marx’s most persistent points, from “On the Jewish Question” forward, is that despite the formal freedoms that we enjoy in a liberal state — the right to freedom of speech, for example, or freedom of religion — we are socially and in fact unfree. (As Bruno Leipold reports in his Citizen Marx, a lot of Marx’s evidence for this claim, particularly about religion, came from travelers’ reports to America, which Marx read assiduously.) That is what it means to live in a liberal society, says Marx: formally free, actually unfree.
But lately I’ve been wondering whether we are not living in the reverse. Despite the efforts of right-wingers to bend the state in a repressive, less free direction, society seems more and more resistant to these efforts. Producing a situation that is, in some sense, the mirror image of what Marx described.
When I compare the current moment, since Donald Trump first rose to power, to previous moments of political repression and coercion and intimidation, it’s hard not to conclude that, at both the national and the state and local levels, this may be the weakest, most flailing effort to control society and individual and collective behavior in American history.
There are, of course, a lot of crosscutting tendencies in the current moment, with facts pointing in contradictory directions and eliciting multiple interpretations. But any full account of the right-wing mobilization of the last ten years has to take into account facts such as these (and there are others one could point to):
- A few months ago, the media reported that despite the multiple abortion bans across the country, there were more abortions last year than ever, including in states with the most rigid bans.
- After years of intense effort to suppress the vote, we saw voting rates and electoral participation skyrocket, in 2020, to their highest levels in a century, often among groups that historically had lower rates of turnout….
Auteur: Corey Robin
