Archive of Dylan Riley

"The moment of Fukuyama had arrived. There seemed to be an undeniable internal relationship between capitalism and democracy.

How did the left react?"

"The representative, especially of a subordinate group, always stands in an ambiguous position. She tries to speak on behalf of the group’s interests. This raises the whole well-chewed complex of arguments about how the principal (the group) can control its agent (the representative). But there is a more basic problem that needs addressing. This is the interest that the agent has in the preservation of the group as it positively exists."

"There are two great examples of the attempt to replace politics with what André Singer calls “the republican experiment (ensaio republicano)”: the Italian Mani pulite and the Brazilian Lava Jato. These were efforts to create a political movement on the basis of anticorruption. The first ended in the spectacular failure and inversion of the Berlusconi years. The second was a decisive cause of Bolsonaro’s rise."

Attempts to identify Trump with fascism have proliferated across the political spectrum. In the latest number of New Left Review, Dylan Riley argues that the comparison serves rather to illuminate the specificity of today’s political situation – and the incoherence of Trump’s form of rule.