POSTDEMOCRACY IN AMERICA
Introduction
BIOGRAPHY
Joe Lowndes is a scholar of American politics, with a specific focus on right-wing politics, populism, and race. Among other publications, he is the author of From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism (Yale University Press), and co-author with Daniel Martinez HoSang of Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity (University of Minnesota Press).
He is currently co-editing a volume titled The Politics of the Multiracial Right (New York University Press in 2025).; and he is at work on another book, Adventures in Post-Democracy, which seeks to explain the growing authoritarian trend in American political culture through a chronicle of his ethnographic work in right-wing spaces over the last decade (University of California Press 2025).
Lowndes is a Visiting Distinguished Lecturer at Hunter College. Before coming to Hunter, he was Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon. He holds a PhD in Political Science from The New School for Social Research.
BOOKS
2019. Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity. With Daniel Martinez HoSang. University of Minnesota Press.
2008. From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism. Yale University Press.
2008. Race and American Political Development. Edited with Julie Novkov and Dorian Warren. Routledge Press.
WORKS IN PROGRESS
Adventures in Post-Democracy
This project engages and extends the literature on democratic backsliding generally by moving beyond standard indices of democratic health to consider extra-institutional sites of both democratic and anti-democratic politics. It does so particularly by rooting the threat of U.S. democratic decline in the specificities of prior racial orders here. Joe Lowndes combine field observations from GOP events, far-right rallies, white supremacist meetings, and Blue Lives Matter counter-demonstrations with archival materials on the development of right-wing populism since the 1990s. The book has generated interest from both Oxford University Press and the University of California Press.
The Rise of the Multiracial Right
This co-edited volume with Daniel Martinez HoSang that brings together leading scholars of race and politics (including Janelle Wong, Corey Fields, Cristina Beltran, and Laura Pulido) to examine this phenomenon among Black, Latinx, API, and Indigenous voters, elected officials, and political entrepreneurs; as well as in prominent institutional sites of conservative politics, such as think tanks, media outlets, and party organizations. Under contract with New York University Press in November 2022.
Joe Lowndes est l’auteur de nombreux articles, essais et chapitres de livres dont vous pouvez trouver la liste intégrale sur son site internet : https://joelowndes.org/cv/
BIOGRAPHY
Joe Lowndes is a scholar of American politics, with a specific focus on right-wing politics, populism, and race. Among other publications, he is the author of From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism (Yale University Press), and co-author with Daniel Martinez HoSang of Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity (University of Minnesota Press).
He is currently co-editing a volume titled The Politics of the Multiracial Right (New York University Press in 2025).; and he is at work on another book, Adventures in Post-Democracy, which seeks to explain the growing authoritarian trend in American political culture through a chronicle of his ethnographic work in right-wing spaces over the last decade (University of California Press 2025).
Lowndes is a Visiting Distinguished Lecturer at Hunter College. Before coming to Hunter, he was Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon. He holds a PhD in Political Science from The New School for Social Research.
BOOKS
2019. Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity. With Daniel Martinez HoSang. University of Minnesota Press.
2008. From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism. Yale University Press.
2008. Race and American Political Development. Edited with Julie Novkov and Dorian Warren. Routledge Press.
WORKS IN PROGRESS
Adventures in Post-Democracy
This project engages and extends the literature on democratic backsliding generally by moving beyond standard indices of democratic health to consider extra-institutional sites of both democratic and anti-democratic politics. It does so particularly by rooting the threat of U.S. democratic decline in the specificities of prior racial orders here. Joe Lowndes combine field observations from GOP events, far-right rallies, white supremacist meetings, and Blue Lives Matter counter-demonstrations with archival materials on the development of right-wing populism since the 1990s. The book has generated interest from both Oxford University Press and the University of California Press.
The Rise of the Multiracial Right
This co-edited volume with Daniel Martinez HoSang that brings together leading scholars of race and politics (including Janelle Wong, Corey Fields, Cristina Beltran, and Laura Pulido) to examine this phenomenon among Black, Latinx, API, and Indigenous voters, elected officials, and political entrepreneurs; as well as in prominent institutional sites of conservative politics, such as think tanks, media outlets, and party organizations. Under contract with New York University Press in November 2022.
Joe Lowndes est l’auteur de nombreux articles, essais et chapitres de livres dont vous pouvez trouver la liste intégrale sur son site internet : https://joelowndes.org/cv/
Prolog
In 2016 and then again four years later, something unprecedented almost happened in American politics. Bernie Sanders, an outsider hailing from the left, came close to winning the Democratic nomination for president. Of course, there had been prior instances of progressive candidates trying to bring the left into the fold. Yet this was different. Sanders did not just seek to broaden the Democratic base: as an Independent Senator, his goal was to conquer the Democratic party machine.
While the Bernie campaign was unique on the liberal side of the spectrum, attempted takeovers have been a common and consequential feature of rightwing politics in the US. This is the argument persuasively developed by Joe Lowndes - a scholar of American right-wing politics and an intrepid ethnographer of its most extremist exponents. In the last six decades, Joe Lowndes explains, whenever segments of the radical right have set out to capture the Republican party in order to remake it in their own image, they have either succeeded outright or planted the seeds for later triumphs.
Lowndes’s first book made a compelling case for the reassessment of the so-called “Southern strategy” that brought Richard Nixon to power in 1968 and got him reelected in 1972. Entitled From the New Deal to the New Right, the book showed that the “silent majority” successfully mobilized by Nixon’s campaign managers should not be interpreted as the absorption of segregationist Dixiecrats into a pre-existing GOP. Instead, the Southern Strategy consisted of a conquest and subsequently a transformation of the Republican party by Southern Democrats. What Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign had started, despite his crushing defeat in the presidential election, turned out to be the prelude of an enduring makeover of the American right.
The Republican party always left the door at least ajar for nativists and racialist ideologues. But Joe Lowndes stresses that until the end of the Cold war, both the imprint of the civil rights movement and the strictures of the US-led international liberal order kept the GOP leadership in check, at least rhetorically. Even under Ronald Reagan, socially regressive measures largely needed to be couched in color- and gender-blind discourse. Such self-imposed restraint began to loosen after the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, at least on the margins of the party and as a reaction against the neoconservative sway over the Republican establishment.
From his book Producers, Parasites, Patriots, co-written with Daniel Martinez HoSang, to his forthcoming book, Adventures in Post-Democracy, Joe Lowndes’s recent work examines the gradual permeation of the conservative mainstream by far-right currents. He retraces a course of events that begins with Pat Buchanan’s failed bid for the Republican nomination in 1992 and that runs through Donald Trump’s first and second coming. In our interview, he revisits the forays successively made by the paleoconservatives in the 1990s and the Tea Party under the presidency of Barack Obama, before delving into the evolving relationship between neofascist groups, the MAGA base, and the Trump administration.
Among the striking insights that Joe Lowndes draws from his exploration of the bleakest corners of American politics is that what the media depicted as the low points of Trump 1.0 proved instrumental in the real estate magnate’s return to power. Far from fraying in the face of apparent setbacks, the MAGA coalition grew more radical but also more determined and self-confident in the wake of the alt-right debacle in Charlottesville, the COVID pandemic, the Black Lives Matter protests and the aborted coup of January 6, 2021.
Another major development that Joe Lowndes has explored in his collaborative work with Daniel Martinez HoSang – and again in our interview with him — is the emergence of a multiracial far-right in the United States. Already examined in Producers, Parasites, Patriots, this remarkable if paradoxical trend has been confirmed by the increase in minority votes for Trump from 2016 to 2024, but also by the growing presence of activists of color in the most extreme far-right groups. This hardly means that racism and xenophobia are less prominent with Trump 2.0, quite the contrary. What is new, however, is the fact that the MAGA cult is increasingly welcoming to anyone eager to celebrate whiteness, nativism and masculinity, regardless of their race, nationality or gender.
Finally, we asked Joe Lowndes what his peregrinations at Trump rallies and other major gatherings of the new “new right” have taught him, not only about MAGA’s social and affective fabric but also about the blind spots and avoidance techniques of its adversaries. Rather than confront their responsibilities in the current situation, liberals merely long for a return to the status quo ante. Leftists meanwhile are often more inclined to focus on the failures of liberalism than on addressing what we are up against now.
Our interview took place in New York, on February 24, 2025.
Prolog
In 2016 and then again four years later, something unprecedented almost happened in American politics. Bernie Sanders, an outsider hailing from the left, came close to winning the Democratic nomination for president. Of course, there had been prior instances of progressive candidates trying to bring the left into the fold. Yet this was different. Sanders did not just seek to broaden the Democratic base: as an Independent Senator, his goal was to conquer the Democratic party machine.
While the Bernie campaign was unique on the liberal side of the spectrum, attempted takeovers have been a common and consequential feature of rightwing politics in the US. This is the argument persuasively developed by Joe Lowndes - a scholar of American right-wing politics and an intrepid ethnographer of its most extremist exponents. In the last six decades, Joe Lowndes explains, whenever segments of the radical right have set out to capture the Republican party in order to remake it in their own image, they have either succeeded outright or planted the seeds for later triumphs.
Lowndes’s first book made a compelling case for the reassessment of the so-called “Southern strategy” that brought Richard Nixon to power in 1968 and got him reelected in 1972. Entitled From the New Deal to the New Right, the book showed that the “silent majority” successfully mobilized by Nixon’s campaign managers should not be interpreted as the absorption of segregationist Dixiecrats into a pre-existing GOP. Instead, the Southern Strategy consisted of a conquest and subsequently a transformation of the Republican party by Southern Democrats. What Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign had started, despite his crushing defeat in the presidential election, turned out to be the prelude of an enduring makeover of the American right.
The Republican party always left the door at least ajar for nativists and racialist ideologues. But Joe Lowndes stresses that until the end of the Cold war, both the imprint of the civil rights movement and the strictures of the US-led international liberal order kept the GOP leadership in check, at least rhetorically. Even under Ronald Reagan, socially regressive measures largely needed to be couched in color- and gender-blind discourse. Such self-imposed restraint began to loosen after the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, at least on the margins of the party and as a reaction against the neoconservative sway over the Republican establishment.
From his book Producers, Parasites, Patriots, co-written with Daniel Martinez HoSang, to his forthcoming book, Adventures in Post-Democracy, Joe Lowndes’s recent work examines the gradual permeation of the conservative mainstream by far-right currents. He retraces a course of events that begins with Pat Buchanan’s failed bid for the Republican nomination in 1992 and that runs through Donald Trump’s first and second coming. In our interview, he revisits the forays successively made by the paleoconservatives in the 1990s and the Tea Party under the presidency of Barack Obama, before delving into the evolving relationship between neofascist groups, the MAGA base, and the Trump administration.
Among the striking insights that Joe Lowndes draws from his exploration of the bleakest corners of American politics is that what the media depicted as the low points of Trump 1.0 proved instrumental in the real estate magnate’s return to power. Far from fraying in the face of apparent setbacks, the MAGA coalition grew more radical but also more determined and self-confident in the wake of the alt-right debacle in Charlottesville, the COVID pandemic, the Black Lives Matter protests and the aborted coup of January 6, 2021.
Another major development that Joe Lowndes has explored in his collaborative work with Daniel Martinez HoSang – and again in our interview with him — is the emergence of a multiracial far-right in the United States. Already examined in Producers, Parasites, Patriots, this remarkable if paradoxical trend has been confirmed by the increase in minority votes for Trump from 2016 to 2024, but also by the growing presence of activists of color in the most extreme far-right groups. This hardly means that racism and xenophobia are less prominent with Trump 2.0, quite the contrary. What is new, however, is the fact that the MAGA cult is increasingly welcoming to anyone eager to celebrate whiteness, nativism and masculinity, regardless of their race, nationality or gender.
Finally, we asked Joe Lowndes what his peregrinations at Trump rallies and other major gatherings of the new “new right” have taught him, not only about MAGA’s social and affective fabric but also about the blind spots and avoidance techniques of its adversaries. Rather than confront their responsibilities in the current situation, liberals merely long for a return to the status quo ante. Leftists meanwhile are often more inclined to focus on the failures of liberalism than on addressing what we are up against now.
Our interview took place in New York, on February 24, 2025.