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Notes
* Expanded and updated from an article first published in German in Das Argument: Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Sozialwissenschaften, no. 323 (2017/3); republished with the kind permission of its editors; originally presented in a panel “The Crisis of the Political,” Institut für kritische Theorie, Berlin, June 9, 2017. For their comments and suggestions, I thank Mat Callahan, Al Campbell, George Comninel, Hester Eisenstein, Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Carl Grey Martin, Ludmila Melchior-Yahil, Liz Mestres, Gerald Meyer, and Suren Moodliar.
1 A similar outcome is regularly produced in the House of Representatives by means of gerrymandering: “In 2012, Democratic Party candidates managed to win only 201 of 435 US House of Representatives elections despite receiving an overall majority of the total combined votes in nationwide House election races.” Jowei Chen and David Cottrell, “Evaluating Partisan Gains from Congressional Gerrymandering,” Electoral Studies 44 (2016), 329, http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jowei/gerrymandering.pdf
3 See David Vine, Base Nation: How U.S. Bases Abroad Harm America and the World (New York: Henry Holt, 2015).
4 See Chris Hedges, “Trump is the Symptom, Not the Disease” (May 14, 2017), http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/trump_is_the_symptom_not_the_disease_20170514
5 On the police role, see Steve Martinot, “Probing the Epidemic of Police Murders,” Socialism and Democracy, 27:1 (March 2013); on criminalization, Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010), and Mumia Abu-Jamal and Johanna Fernández, eds., “The Roots of Mass Incarceration: Locking up Black Dissidents and Punishing the Poor,” special issue of Socialism and Democracy, 28:3 (November 2014); on government complicity in the drug trade, Gary Webb, Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998).
6 U.S. Department of Justice, Correctional Populations in the United States, 2014 (January 2016), https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cpus14.pdf; The Sentencing Project, Felony Disenfranchisement: A Primer (2016), http://sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Felony-Disenfranchisement-Primer.pdf
7 See John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney, Dollarocracy: How the Money-and-Media Election Complex is Destroying America (New York: Nation Books, 2013).
8 Such measures played a decisive role in “swing states” that Trump won by a narrow margin. In Wisconsin, where the winning margin was less than 30,000 votes, more than 200,000 people were disqualified by a new voter-ID law; in Michigan, where the winning margin was only 10,000, some 75,000 votes in the heavily African American city of Detroit were lost as a result of malfunctioning optical scanners; in North Carolina, tens of thousands of African American votes were blocked by a reduction in the number of polling stations.
9 On this and other methods of electoral fraud, see especially Greg Palast, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2016), as well as the works of Mark Crispin Miller.
11 See especially Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016).
12 See the graphic half-hour HBO documentary (including interviews) at https://video.vice.com/en_us/video/charlottesville-race-and-terror-vice-news-tonight-on-hbo/59921b1d2f8d32d808bddfbc
13 See John Bellamy Foster, Trump in the White House: Tragedy and Farce (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017).
14 Jim Naureckas, “Three Reasons Bret Stephens Should Not Be a NYT Columnist–and the Real Reason He Is One” (May 2, 2017), http://fair.org/home/three-reasons-bret-stephens-should-not-be-a-nyt-columnist-and-the-real-reason-he-is-one/ The vital stake of capital in ignoring environmental science is explained and acknowledged by some of its enforcers, quoted in Chapter 1 of Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014).
15 I have in mind, for example, the growing right-wing movements in Europe, the drive of the Israeli government to impose total loyalty, and the August 2017 decision of the quintessentially corrupt Temer government in Brazil to open vast areas of the Amazon to private development.
16 For general discussion, see Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Hightech Kapitalismus in der grossen Krise (Hamburg: Argument Verlag, 2012).
18 Adam Greenfield, Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life (London: Verso, 2017), 24. See also John Lanchester, “You Are the Product,” London Review of Books, 39:16 (August 17, 2017).
19 The Federalist Papers [available in many editions], No. 10 (4th paragraph from the end). See also Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
20 See Jan Rehmann, “Bernie Sanders and the Hegemonic Crisis of Neoliberal Capitalism,” Socialism and Democracy, 30:3 (November 2016).
21 See Victor Wallis, “13th and the Culture of Surplus Punishment,” San Francisco Bay View, August 2017, http://sfbayview.com/2017/07/13th-and-the-culture-of-surplus-punishment/