White supremacy was the real glue of American civic association

Evidence

Historian Gabriel Winant concurs, and he goes on to outline the associative foundations of Trump’s coalition. “The primary factor of social 45cohesion in Tocqueville’s America was nothing other than white supremacy,” Winant contends, and “given that this structure has endured, it makes little sense to imagine our society as formerly rich with association but now bereft of it.” With reference to the couple who, in the summer of 2020, emerged from their home armed with an assault rifle and a pistol to threaten participants in a passing Black Lives Matter demonstration, Winant notes that the gun-waving McCloskeys in St. Louis are presumably not members of the same kind of fraternal organizations that were popular in the 19th century, but they are members of a homeowners’ association. Whiteness itself is a kind of inchoate associational gel, out of which a variety of more specific associations may grow in a given historical conjuncture. — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 147

Categorization

• XREF: Winant’s claim that white supremacy rather than civic virtue explains America’s associational density inverts Putnam’s bowling-alone reading of Tocqueville — the chapter’s central methodological move.
• DEFINE: Introduces ‘racial fascism’ (Toscano) as a category for Trump’s coalition in the reader’s periodization framework.