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In case you missed it, this week I interviewed sociologist Dylan Riley about MAGA, fascism, civil society, and democracy. You can listen to the full audio here —

The Battle Over Civil Society

John Ganz · Oct 1

In conjunction with Dissent magazine, I spoke to UC Berkeley sociologist Dylan Riley, author of The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe, about civil society, democracy, and fascism today. You can continue reading the abridged and much-cleaned-up version of the interview below on the Dissent site, or you can listen to Dylan and my full discussion, whi…

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You can also read an edited transcript on the Dissent website.

Riley has a follow-up to a lot of the themes we discussed in our conversation on New Left Review’s Sidecar blog. It is a critique of liberal understandings of civil society that borrow from Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism:

However warranted the concern about the Trump administration’s attack on the non-profit sector, much of this commentary suffers from a double confusion: about the history of totalitarianism and about what civil society is. Regarding the former misconception, it must be emphasized that despite The Origins of Totalitarianism’s many interesting insights – above all concerning imperialism – its central argument is largely wrong. In the two countries that produced indisputably fascist regimes in the interwar period, Italy and Germany, civil society was highly developed prior to the authoritarian takeover. In both, cooperatives, churches, trade unions, political parties and mutual aid societies had experienced massive growth from 1870 onward. The idea that pre-fascist Germany and Italy were atomized mass societies is misleading. And what did the fascists do with this organizational infrastructure once in power? They occupied it and bent it to the regime’s purposes. This contains an important lesson about what civil society is (and what it is not). Civil society, as Gramsci understood, and as today’s liberals do not, is a terrain of struggle. It is not, and cannot be, an agent.

This is highly relevant to the current moment in the US. For it is not the case that MAGA wishes to destroy the realm of associations and interest groups – it seeks to colonize it. It does not discourage civic engagement; it seeks to promote its own forms of it. Thus, in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, J. D. Vance exhorted listeners of Kirk’s podcast to ‘get involved, get involved, get involved’, explaining that civil society ‘is not just something that flows from the government, it flows from each and every one of us’. Ryan Walters, the former superintendent of Oklahoma’s public schools, announced the ambition to launch a Turning Point USA chapter in every high school and college in the state. This is a struggle for hegemony fought on the terrain of civil society, not a struggle for or against a (mythical) realm of pre-political consensus and practical problem solving – what Gramsci would have called a war of position.

But herein lies an irony of which the Trumpists seem blissfully unaware. For, far from exercising great cultural influence as the right claims, leftist and progressive intellectuals in the US have for decades been cordoned off as a privileged but largely irrelevant clerisy within the university-NGO complex. Here they have formed what Gramsci would have called a traditional intelligentsia, speaking to itself in its own arcane language and leaving the left at a severe disadvantage. It is not outside the realm of possibility that the Trump administration’s attempted destruction of this cordon sanitaire might create the conditions for left intellectuals to establish a more intimate link to the political and social forces of the day from which they are presently cut off. If so, Trump would have had a hand in the creation of a new modern prince adapted to the age of social media, virality and artificial intelligence, in addition to the ubiquitous culture industry. MAGA would be midwife of the very thing it most fears.

I wish we had discussed this interpretation of Arendt because, once again, I actually think the account in Origins of “atomization” and Riley’s “civil society overdevelopment” thesis is actually describing the same reality. The confusion is terminological, going back to the ambiguity of the term “civil society” — bürgeliche Gesellschaft — in Hegel. For Hegel, civil society is intrinsically because it’s the realm of “universal egoism.” What Hegel calls “the state” is supposed to integrate these egoistic individuals and their groups into a larger whole. When it fails, you get “the rabble.” And according to Arendt’s genealogy, there is very little difference between the bourgeoisie and the mob. Trump is the chieftain of the enrabbled bourgeoisie. This is all a little sketchy and I’m working on it — maybe I’ll have it worked out for my talk on Wednesday.

An example of civil society eating itself: The New York Times reported that billionaire Marc Rowan is behind the “compact” that the Trump regime wants to enforce in order to ideologically coordinate the universities:

Many of the ideas included in the proposal — and, in some instances, their exact wording — came from a document circulated last winter at the behest of Marc Rowan, the billionaire financier. Mr. Rowan has been keenly interested in higher education and, as the University of Pennsylvania was mired in acrimony over antisemitism and pro-Palestinian activism in 2023, he wielded his wealth and influence to help oust his alma mater’s president.

The proposal that the government released this week called for universities to limit international students, protect conservative speech, generally require standardized testing for admissions and to adopt policies recognizing “that academic freedom is not absolute,” among other conditions. An accompanying cover letter dangled “substantial and meaningful federal grants” for schools that signed up, though those universities could also have their funding jeopardized if the Justice Department decided they had violated the agreement.

We’ve seen the issue of “antisemitism” being used as a justification for attacks on universities, but if one takes the concern about anti-Zionist activism at face value, one has to wonder if the cat isn’t out of the bag. American public opinion is quickly turning against Israel. Dems are moving away from AIPAC. Almost two-thirds of American Jews believe Israel committed war crimes in Gaza, and just under 40 percent think Israel is committing genocide. The old elite is scrambling to contain the damage. Some blame the professors, but some blame social media. On Bill Maher’s show, Van Jones indulged in the idiotic conspiracy theory that credits Qatar and Iran with running an influence campaign to show American youth “dead babies.” Of course, he never pauses to wonder if the mere fact of the dead babies is cause enough. This also perhaps demonstrates another misunderstanding of the terrain of civil society and the inability to control it using old understandings and techniques. Of course, the Ellison takeover of TikTok seems to be an imagined remedy to this problem. Will it work? Don’t think so in the long term.

For the sake of argument, let’s say the turn in American opinion against Israel is a foreign op and it’s all just a big propaganda war. Doesn’t that make Israel and its agents in the Western Democracies just suck terribly at producing and countering propaganda? How else do you lose the country most friendly to you in the course of a couple of years?