Thinking about Peter Turchin's argument in @TheAtlantic that the memory of collective action is what makes democracy possible. If we grant this premise, what does it say for our moment, one in which a huge part of America rejects collective action in response to pandemic?

There is right now simultaneously a resurgence of democratic socialism and a much bigger paranoid hysteria about "socialism"--in scare quotes because what conservatives mean by it is actually totalitarianism.

Here's the thing about "totalitarianism": it's a fiction, the dream of dictators & the nightmare of the rest of us &, like full communism, never actually achieved. When conservatives decry what they call "socialism," they're speaking of the nightmare.

And yet in resisting their nightmare of totalitarianism, which they call "socialism," conservatives collapse into a kind of ecstatic terror in which they imagine the only counterweight to be greater "strength"--their own totalitarian dream.

I think--or, maybe, just wonder--if this is because American conservatism has lost its memory of collective action, and thus its ability to imagine--to conceive--the collaboration & compromise necessary to democracy.

Liberalism & the left retain a powerful & active memory of collective action: the Civil Rights Movement. That seeds the collective action of BLM & other freedom struggles now--& also the less exciting small-d democratic processes of governance (vs. rule).

It's no insult to conservatism to say its central memory of collective action is war--and that for decades it was WW II. So perhaps the collapse of its ability to imagine--& thus practice--democracy is related to the fading memory of the collective action of WW II.

It's not as if there's been a shortage of American wars since. But for conservatives, they don't construct a memory of collective action. Rather, for conservatives the biggest wars since, in Vietnam & Iraq, give rise not to memory but to myth: the stabbed-in-the-back legend.

There's a great book on this, Bringing the War Home, by U. Chicago historian @kathleen_belew, on the origins of the modern militia movement. But for a shorter course in the American stabbed-in-the-back legend of Vietnam, I need just one word: Rambo.

The stabbed-in-the-back legend that emerges for conservatives from Iraq and Afghanistan isn't as clear cut as Rambo. I think of the veterans I met while reporting at Trump rallies, all of whom cited their combat experience as key to their support for Trumpism...

In Shreveport, LA, I met an Iraq vet who'd come to American authoritarianism (aka Trumpism) thru his disillusionment w/ the war in Iraq as "blood for oil"--a phrase some might think wld propel him leftward. Just the opposite...

For this Iraq vet, the fact that he'd been badly injured & lost friends to "blood for oil" led to a stabbed-in-the-back conclusion that the elites of of "democracy"--his scare quotes--wld kill common men such as him. Which led him to embrace instead a strongman.

Those are the mobius-strip politics of American empire viewed through a far right lens. Just as common among Trump veteran supporters are those who believe elites stabbed them in the back by preventing them from using full and decisive violence in Iraq & Afghanistan.

What's missing from both stories? The memory of collective action Peter Turchin suggests is essential to democratic politics. Rightwing populism isn't collective, it's mass, the many fused into one mythic righteous hero, "stabbed-in-the-back" by a rotating cast of enemies.

The pandemic could have changed all this. It could have provided an opportunity for collective action across political spectrum. We would have disagreed, bitterly, about how to fight the virus--but had we all agreed on fighting the virus, that struggle would have been collective.

Now conservatives not only lack a functioning memory of collective action, they have demonized to themselves the very notion of it. The virus is to them a lesser enemy. Better to die resisting solidarity than to live together, or, as they put it, "on your knees."