What if Americans Are the Opposite of "Atomized"?

Thinking with Ganz and Riley on civil society and fascism.

I’ve been mulling over this rapprochement between Dylan Riley and

John Ganz

because it illuminated some things in my own thinking I hadn’t quite articulated. For those who are unfamiliar, Riley is a Marxist sociologist at Berkeley who has written some of the most penetrating analyses of Trumpism, mostly rejecting the historical comparison of Trump to classical fascism. Ganz, meanwhile, has been reading the arguments of Riley’s 2010 book, The Civic Foundations of Fascism, somewhat against the grain of Riley’s pronouncements about Trump to argue that, on the contrary, the fascism analogy is useful.

I have never been especially invested in whether or not we call Trumpism fascism, but one of the benefits of this type of conceptual debate is that it provides a framework for discussion and for sharpening one’s analysis. What I’m going to say here is not about who is “right” in the fascism debate (it’s mostly summary, anyhow), but what feels like productive new emphases that are emerging. In particular, Ganz and Riley’s recent conversation focuses on the state of “civil society,” which in retrospect I think has been an overlooked or taken-for-granted point of Riley’s past analyses; I had also personally failed to assimilate some of Ganz’s arguments about civil society that seem pertinent to where my own thinking had felt “stuck.” That is: what do we make of American civil society? Is it caught up in social media-addled expressive individualism and therefore completely passive in the world of real politics, or is it taking on a new, unfamiliar form of political agency?

A certain strain of contemporary left analysis may put too much emphasis on the virtuality of American political activity. We might call that the “view from the New Left Review,” because not only has the NLR long taken a withering view of democratic agency in the West, but the doctrine of a hopelessly disorganized and addled American masses in the age of Trump has often been expounded by its contributors—notably Anton Jäger and Dylan Riley. They have tended to interpret all of the sound and fury of American politics since 2008 as ultimately signifying little besides more of the elite-managed status quo. That is the upshot of Jäger’s Baudrillard-inflected writings on “hyperpolitics,” which acknowledge a recent upsurge in mobilization but paint a bleak portrait of America’s “vitiated social landscape” and the predominance of a politics that is “low-cost, low-entry, low-duration, and all too often, low-value.” Looking for signs of a revival of golden-age socialist mass politics, Jäger tends to dismiss America’s recent political agitation as mostly a virtual spectacle. “Hyperpolitics comes and goes, like a neutron bomb that shakes the people in the frame but leaves all the infrastructure intact.”

Until recently, Riley was even more summarily dismissive. In his introduction to the 2019 Verso edition of The Civic Foundations of Fascism, he drew a sharp contrast between the highly mobilized civil societies that produced classical fascism and the depoliticized, atomized American present. “‘Trumpism’ and its various European correlates have arisen…in the context of a fragmented and depoliticized civil society: the product of the long historical ebbing of the socialist project, and of basically pacific relations in the capitalist core.” And: “While fascism was a product of intense civil society and associational development, Trumpism is an expression of the etiolation and weakening of civil society.”

Especially in view of Trump 2.0, I have wondered if this type of claim is too historically rigid or too wedded to a left schematics that treats anything that doesn’t look like “classical” mass politics as somehow not counting—to wit, if the masses aren’t organized in a way that looks like the socialist politics we believe in, then whatever they’re doing is somehow merely performative, virtual, or otherwise not “real.” Ganz, however, has drawn on the original text of Riley’s book, which was an intervention in theories of fascism in sociology and political science written before fascism was in the headlines every day. With a somewhat looser interpretive touch, Ganz argues, Civic Foundations can be read against Riley’s previous analysis of Trumpism.

Civic Foundations was aimed against one of the dominant theories of “totalitarianism” in social science, namely that it emerged in countries with “weak” civil societies, where the masses were “atomized” and thus susceptible to authoritarian movements. Drawing on Tocqueville, liberal social scientists argued—or probably more accurately, assumed—that a strong civil society (voluntary associations, clubs, etc) automatically went with liberal democracy and served as a defense against totalitarianism. Riley blew a hole in that notion by showing empirically that, on the contrary, fascism emerged from highly developed and intensely mobilized civil societies whose demands the state was unable to integrate into the existing order. He drew on the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci to theorize this situation as a “crisis of hegemony”: that is, the social legitimacy of the ruling classes and the existing order collapses in the face of an “overdevelopment” of civil society that it is unable to contain. Fascism arises as a response that positions against the ruling order and against politics itself, but, crucially, in the name of a deeper, truer representation of the people: Riley’s most controversial—but in my opinion brilliant—move was to refer to fascism as a “democratic authoritarianism.”

Ganz picks up on these political crisis terms of Riley’s analysis and wonders why they aren’t applicable to the present: an agitated civil society that rejects the existing order, a crisis of hegemony, an authoritarian movement that claims only itself can restore true democracy, etc. This bit from his conversation with Riley caught my eye:

As for civil society, many argued that Americans were increasingly atomized, citing Robert D. Putnam’s Bowling Alone. But I thought the internet had perhaps created a new form of civil society, an excess of associative activity and democratic demands beyond the traditional party and state’s representative institutions’ capacity to contain them—similar to what you described in Europe.

This is clarifying thought, because it suggests we should take online politics seriously as more than mere performative virtuality rooted in atomization (Jäger) or a means of top-down manipulation through conspiracy and “disinformation,” arguably the dominant liberal view. What has become a general moral panic in the American media about social media, phones, fragmentation, and the “loneliness epidemic” perhaps leads us to overlook the real associative power of those technologies, the way they have created public spheres that extend beyond the internet and produce their own forms of organization. Just because their outbursts seem ephemeral and haven’t given rise to new political parties doesn’t mean we can take their weakness for granted. Personally, and only semi-jokingly, I would call armies of citizens getting people fired for kissing at a Coldplay concert an overdevelopment of civil society.

In the conversation with Ganz, Riley seems to concede the point:

The online component has become clearer to me in the second term. At first, I saw it mainly as a Twitter spectacle. Now it’s obvious how these infrastructures can rally allies and discipline opponents. It’s analogous to classic fascist mobilization, though the form is different. Instead of party cards and dues—not everyone is going to join the MAGA party—it’s online threats and employer pressure, sometimes promoted from the White House. That is the organizational form emerging now. If you listen carefully to J.D. Vance when he took over Charlie Kirk’s podcast immediately following the assassination, he calls for people to get involved. He even uses the terminology of civil society. He is essentially exhorting people to attack their opponents online and flag posts that express inappropriate views about Kirk.

This all seems more productive to me than thought-terminating clichés about “atomization.” What if the sense of alienation provoked by the internet is not an indication of isolation or “loneliness,” but rather a pessimism or even nihilism resulting from the fact that civil society’s excess of political consciousness has “nowhere to go” in the existing structures of politics?