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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In the aftermath of the Cold War, many societies seemed firmly set on a pathway to cultural reintegration, progressive reform, and democratic government. This didn�t happen. Instead, they have become increasingly polarized, and far-right antidemocratic forces are gaining power. In his new work, Jeffrey Alexander explains why, developing an approach to social change that challenges the faith in progress that underpins much contemporary thinking.
Far from being a smooth movement forward, progressive social change is like a car crash where cars pile up. The greater the movement forward, the greater the reaction to it. Reform movements such as anti-racism, feminism, and open immigration should be understood as frontlash movements creating extraordinary tensions. They challenge not only material interests but ideal ones the taken-for-granted meanings that have made life worth living for those on the traditional side. Angry backlash movements slam on the brakes. They aim not only to halt forward progress, but to move backward, to how things were in the good old days.
Today we are witnessing a surge of powerful backlash movements in many parts of the world in the US, in Europe, in India, and elsewhere. Against these onslaughts, the universalizing culture and institutions of democratic civil spheres have so far managed to retain their resilience, but how long can they continue to hold?
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Quote
Note
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Doing and Undoing of Civil Repair
Notes
1 Frontlash and Backlash
Notes
2 Office Obligation as Civil Virtue: The Crisis of American Democracy, November 3, 2020 – January 6, 2021, and After
The Theory: Elections, Office, and Civil Sphere
The Empirical Case: Defending the 2020 Presidential Election against Threats to Overturn It
The Emergence of Civil Icons (1): Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger
The Emergence of Civil Icons (2): US Vice President Mike Pence
“January 6” as Punctum
Crystallizing a Civil-Conservative Center: The January 6th Commission and Its Afterlife
Conclusion: The Still Precarious Present
Notes
3 Trump’s Brain: Stephen Bannon Rages against the Enlightenment
Indignation over Civil Incorporation
Far-Right Ideology as a Culture Structure
From Backlash Ideology to Incendiary Action
Immigrants as Non-White Horde
The Counter-Enlightenment as Backlash
Out of Power, in Jail, and Back Again
4 The Challenge of Solidarity: The Indian Civil Sphere between Vitality and Suppression
Model of the Civil Sphere
The Civil Sphere in Independent India
Contradictions: Independent India’s “Actually Existing” Civil Sphere
Frontlash/Backlash
Layered Backlash in India
Cultural Backlash and Political (De)Formation
Between Vitality and Suppression
Notes
5 Europe’s Backlash against Immigration: Resisting the Multicultural Mode of Incorporation
The Social Science of Recent European Immigration
Theorizing Difference and Solidarity
Reconstructing European Civil Society
The New Immigrant Other
The Resistance to Multiculturalism
Notes
6 The Reemergence of Antisemitism (1): Waves of Societalization and What Conditions Them
Antisemitism as a Culture Structure
Emergence of a Civil Sphere
Backlash against Civil Incorporation
Restoration of the Civil Sphere and Postwar Anti-antisemitism
Variations of Societalization
Antisemitism Returns: Toward an Explanatory Model
Theorizing Waves of Societalization
Conclusion
Notes
7 The Reemergence of Antisemitism (2): Inverting the “Lessons of the Holocaust” before, during, and after Gaza
Notes
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Quote
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Doing and Undoing of Civil Repair
Begin Reading
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
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FRONTLASH/BACKLASH
JEFFREY C. ALEXANDER
polity
Copyright © Jeffrey C. Alexander 2025
The right of Jeffrey C. Alexander to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2025 by Polity Press Ltd.
Polity Press Ltd.65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press Ltd.111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6377-7
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2025931620
The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Dedication
For Morel,My vital center
We know that man’s salvation may well be impossible, yet we say that this is no reason to stop trying.
Albert Camus, Combat (November 4, 1944)1
Note
1.
Camus (2007: 102).
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Early in the evening of July 2, 1964, in an atmosphere of equal part solemnity and jubilation, President Lyndon Johnson (LBJ) signed into law the most important civil repair of racial injustice in a century. Later that evening, his mood faded into melancholy, and he confided to an aide, “I think we’ve just delivered the South to the Republican party for a long time to come.”
This brief historical moment encapsulates the profound social currents that form the themes of this book. LBJ wedged open the civil sphere of the United States in a singular manner, formalizing a vast movement for racial incorporation that had begun decades earlier and would continue right up until the present day. This utopian movement was filled with hope and looked to the future with great expectations. Yet it also created ashes in its wake.
Civil repair is a fire that burns down repressive social structures and eviscerates narrow social beliefs. Reform is civil correction but also civil interruption, not just forward- looking but frontlash. In a pluralistic society that allows free association, great reforms create great reactions. The more powerful the frontlash, the more powerful and dangerous the backlash. The mid- 1960s victories of civil rights and the powerful movements that came after them offered African Americans, women, and other excluded minorities unprecedented rights and extraordinary opportunities for incorporation; they also fueled racist and misogynist movements that brought right- wing conservatives to power, from Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.
In my own lifetime, I have experienced the joy of frontlash victory and the disappointment of backlash defeat. I was exhilarated by the courage of Martin Luther King and inspired by the rhetoric of LBJ, which echoed the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.” I despaired in 1972 when President Nixon defeated his idealistic challenger George McGovern, for whom I was campaigning doorto- door. I was incredulous, and more than a little frightened, when Reagan defeated the reformist President Jimmy Carter in 1980. When Bill Clinton defeated Reagan’s successor, George H. W. Bush, in 2000, he was not only literally “the man from Hope” (Arkansas) but, figuratively, the living embodiment of passionate expectations for social reform. In 2008, Barack Obama’s prophetic affirmation “Yes We Can” was more than a campaign slogan; it was a stirring promise to work for social equality. I devoted two books to that great African American’s idealistic efforts to expand civil solidarity, and I was deeply disturbed by the bigoted whiteness movement that rose up against him, which opened the door to Trumpism and threatens to hamper further progress, if not to block it, today. This right- wing populist backlash is also anti- feminist and pro- Christian. As a Jewish American, I have lived most of my life inside the protective structures that institutionalized the “Lessons of the Holocaust.” Trumpism challenges anti- antisemitism in deeply unsettling ways.
While the dialectic of frontlash/backlash is widely experienced, it has rarely been theorized. To begin the task of doing so is the ambition of this book. We need to recognize that making social progress – wedging open the civil sphere in order to widen our democracy – shakes things up big time. We need to conceptualize not just social reform but frontlash and the backlash reactions it creates. And we need to theorize the polarization of frontlash/backash in relation to solidarity, to the overarching commitments to one another – no matter what our heartfelt partisan beliefs – that make civil cooperation possible.
In researching and writing the essays that follow, I have benefited greatly from the assistance of dozens of talented Yale graduate students and postdoctoral scholars, most of them affiliated with the Center for Cultural Sociology. I thank Nadine Amalfi for her careful and insightful editorial assistance in transforming these essays into the chapters of this book. We have been working in harness together for more than two decades, and it has been a pleasure and a privilege.
The first six chapters in this volume have been previously published, but they are revised here in minor and sometimes more significant ways. I am grateful for permission to republish them here.
(Chapter 1) Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews for “Frontlash/Backlash: The Crisis of Solidarity and the Threat to Civil Institutions,” vol. 48(1): 5–11. January 2019.
(Chapter 2) Society for “Office Obligation as Civil Virtue: The Crisis of American Democracy, November 3, 2020 – January 6, 2021, and After,” vol. 60: 651–69. September 2023.
(Chapter 3) Culture, Newsletter of the Sociology of Culture Section of the American Sociological Association for “Raging Against the Enlightenment: The Ideology of Steven Bannon,” vol. 29(1 & 2). Spring/Summer 2017.
(Chapter 4) Polity Press for “Introduction: The Indian Civil Sphere between Vitality and Suppression,” in Jeffrey C. Alexander and Suryakant Waghmore, eds., The Indian Civil Sphere, 2025.
(Chapter 5) Ethnic and Racial Studies for “Struggling over the Mode of Incorporation: Backlash against Multiculturalism in Europe,” vol. 36(4): 531–56. 2013.
(Chapter 6) American Journal of Cultural Sociology for Jeffrey Alexander and Tracy Adams, “The Return of Antisemitism? Waves of Societalization and What Conditions Them,” vol. 11: 251–68. February 2023.
INTRODUCTION: THE DOING AND UNDOING OF CIVIL REPAIR
Social change can be a bone- crunching process of economic and political rationalization that erects hierarchies of domination and exploitation. But it is not only that. It is also the creation of cultural meanings and the solidarities they create. The widest of these solidarities is the civil sphere, a world of discourse and feeling, institutions and interactions. The civil sphere is aspirational, a cosmopolitan canopy (Anderson 2012) inside of which every individual – no matter what their color, class, caste, creed, or sexuality – has the right to express their individuality and an obligation to respect the rights and feelings of others.
To the degree that its ideals are institutionalized, the civil sphere sustains horizontal obligations that crosscut the vertical forces that have traditionally been the focus of social theory. Fighting against solidary exclusion is as vital to making progress as fighting against vertical domination. The oppressed are not just exploited but left out. They struggle not only for power and material resources, but for incorporation into a broader solidarity. Yes, progressive social change is about redistributing goods, but it is also about redistributing affect and recognition, and about reconfiguring collectively shared social meanings so that a more civil solidarity is possible. Civil repair allows categories of people polluted as less- than- human “others” to become transformed so that they are treated as more fully human beings. As people who partake of the sacrality of the civil, they are not only empowered but entitled to care and concern, and sometimes even to love.
Purifying polluted categories of persons expands civil solidarity and strengthens the boundaries of the civil sphere vis- à-vis the non- civil institutions that surround it. Making the civil sphere more powerful and independent allows the resources of justice, liberty, and equality to be more readily available. Facing the instrumentalizing forces of the market, the theocratic pressures of religion, the patriarchies of family, suffering persons can frame their oppression in terms of the civil sphere’s utopian promises, translating their particular experiences into universalizing terms that resonate with those who have not themselves experienced the suffering at first hand. Social movements transmute embittering suffering into powerful trauma dramas of outrage and indignation, projecting empowering stories into the cosmopolitan canopy from the periphery outside. If these symbolic performances are persuasive, solidarity expands and material goods are redistributed.
But, as Martin Luther King cautioned, expansive solidarity is only a promissory note. “Actually existing” civil spheres are founded by core groups whose primordial identities effectively narrow the definition of civility to particular qualities of class and caste, religion and ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and race. Indeed, the discourse of the civil sphere concerns itself not only with what is civil, but what is not. It is not only an enlightening and inspiring discourse about the good but a darkly debilitating discourse about evil. Civil discourse juxtaposes sacred qualities such as rationality, autonomy, altruism, and cooperativeness with profane qualities like irrationality, dependence, egoism, and aggression. The first set expands solidarity, generating the mutual trust that allows democratic self- governance; the second set makes solidarity impossible, demanding top- down authority for social order to be maintained.
Struggles for civil repair challenge the primordial qualities that narrow civil identities and protect the privileges of core groups. But such progressive efforts to purify polluted outgroups – to translate more particularistic qualities into more universal ones – trigger resistance. The primordial fights back. Civil repair is progressive, reformist, and sometimes radical; resistance to it is reactive, conservative, and sometimes deeply reactionary. Civil repair challenges not only the material but the ideal interests of core groups. It challenges what have been taken to be sacred qualities. It unsettles the feelings, the talk, and the deeply experienced tactile textures of tradition that make life meaningful and worth living. What has been taken as moral is now defined as hypocritical. What has been considered beautiful is now perceived as ugly. Once worthy qualities – of gender and sexuality and faith – are now derided as shams that deserve neither deference nor respect; they become objects of ridicule and deserving of condemnation instead.
All this explains why repairing the civil sphere is far from a smooth ride on a sunny day. It is a bumpy and accelerating ride, and it will eventually crash, with cars piling up behind it. Progress is a frontlash movement that triggers backlash, a reactive response aiming to reverse the civil sphere’s newly won expansions.1 Frontlash sends shock waves through the brain and limbs of forward- leaning passengers. The brakes get slammed on, and riders are jerked backward. They shout, “Stop! We can’t go so fast and so far.” Backlash torques the torso of the social body, blocking the forward motion of the “civil sphere express.” It aims not only to stop the civil sphere’s forward motion, but to push it backward to an earlier place. Backlash pollutes more universal definitions of solidarity; it embraces the meanings of social life that existed in the old and golden days, highlighting qualities that more closely resemble the core group’s (cf. Karakaya 2020).
While American President Donald Trump is only the most recent in a long line of angry, reactionary, and radical American political figures (Mast 2021), he is the first explicitly anti- civil leader to have been elected to occupy the White House.2 He triumphed by creating powerfully felicitous performances that challenged frontlash movements of progressive social change. Trump’s 2016 campaign reacted against the ascension to the presidency of the African- American Barack Obama and against the “Black Lives Matter” movement that exploded in President Obama’s second term. Trump created a deceitful, insinuating, and highly effective “birther” campaign that painted the first Black American president as a foreigner not born on American soil.3 His campaign resounded with rhetoric insisting that “Blue Lives” (of policemen) and “White Lives” (of the silent majority) mattered more than the lives of protesting Blacks (Ostertag 2020).
While racism continued to provide background music for Trump’s comeback campaign in 2024, the backlash fueling it was most powerfully energized by anti- feminism.4 #MeToo had erupted during the crudely misogynist president’s first term in office, and its searing pollution of sexual harassment in the workplace continued to inflame American public life in the years after.5 In 2024, Trump’s Democratic opponent was Kamala Harris, a mixed- race “woman of color.” As Trump once again campaigned on the backward- looking promise to “Make America Great Again,” Kamala Harris emphatically disagreed, adamantly insisting, “We’re Never Going Back.” The Democrat represented frontlash forces, the Republican the forces of backlash.
Backlash won. An advertisement that cost the Trump campaign $50 million displayed a grainy 2019 video of then US Senator Harris endorsing transgender surgery for prisoners; at the bottom of the screen there scrolled, in large white letters, this backlash message: “Kamala is for they/them. Trump is for you.” Post- election, a MAGA Congressperson responded indignantly to the election of the first openly transwoman to the House of Representatives, declaring she intended to bar her from entering women- only bathrooms. Republican Majority Leader Mike Johnson rushed to offer support, explaining, “Men are men, and women are women, and nothing can change that.”
While highly rhetorical, nostalgia for the olden golden days is hardly merely “symbolic.” Its message can inspire massive right- wing social movements that can seize state power and exercise violent force.
During the 15 years of frontlash “Reconstruction” that followed in the wake of Northern victory in the US Civil War, newly enfranchised African Americans in Southern states were elected to hundreds of powerful state and Federal offices; 20,000 Federal soldiers were stationed in Southern states to make sure newly enfranchised Black citizens could exercise their civil power. Southern white backlash exploded. Armed whites seized capitol buildings, burned free Black communities to the ground, and began highly public lynchings of Black people. By the late 1870s, Reconstruction was rolled back. Federal troops were withdrawn from the South; fiercely racist Jim Crow laws created an apartheid regime that lasted until the middle of the next century.
After the victorious Allies defeated German- led Axis powers in World War I, the Versailles Treaty installed in Germany a democratic government protecting civil diversity and allowing free and fair elections. The frontlash civil reforms that marked “Weimar” set off perfervid anxieties, not only among masses of Volk but among Germany’s economic, academic, and religious elites. An incendiary backlash erupted, triggering waves of mob violence and mobilizing such rabid support for antidemocratic political parties that the Nazis were able to legally accede to state power. They suppressed the German civil sphere, created a dictatorial party- state, and instituted Aryanization policies that narrowed and primordialized national solidarity. Jews and other nonconforming others were deprived of their citizenship rights and eventually murdered en masse; the Nazicontrolled German state launched a horrendously destructive war that aimed to stamp out not only the institutions, but the very idea, of a civil sphere from Western social life.
In the wake of this near- death experience, European nations outside the Soviet world initiated historically unprecedented frontlash reforms, expanding their civil spheres and submerging the particularizing restrictions of ethnicity, class, and religion, and eventually, under the umbrella of the European Union, the very idea of the “nation” itself. Now, 70 years later, facing massive immigration from inside and outside a newly expanded EU, the earlier primordial aggressions that had destroyed Old Europe have demonstrated worrisome signs of coming back to life. Brexit put a debilitating crack in the European civil sphere, and far- right neo- fascist parties have gained power on the Continent. After the Cold War, Russia had wedged open its long suppressed civil sphere, empowering citizens and binding government to their will. Within two decades, the Russian civil sphere had withered, overcome by primordial affinities of nationalism, ethnicity, and religion. A now autocratic Russia launched a war against Ukraine to prevent its transformation into a more civil, “European” state.
In postcolonial India, a newly democratic civil sphere allowed anti- caste movements to flourish, initiating frontlash reforms that mandated massive affirmative action, challenging caste pollution and remarkably expanding civil boundaries. Backlash forces surged relentlessly in response. A long- brewing, fundamentalist “Hindutva” religious revival inspired vigilante violence, creating a dangerously anti- civil political party, the BJP, that defeated Congress and put a demagogic leader, Narendra Modi, into power for three consecutive terms.
The question is: How far does the political pendulum swing from left to right? Is it two steps forward, one step back, or one step forward and two steps back? How far can backlash challenge expanding solidarities without undermining the boundaries that protect the civil sphere’s autonomy vis- à-vis destructive intrusions of religion, race, gender, ethnicity, and state? When civil forces rise up in protest, will backlash movements deploy force and fraud to prevent an indignant civil sphere from placing its representatives back in control of the state?
The chapters that follow explore frontlash/backlash dynamics in the US, Europe, and India, illuminating such contentious contemporary issues as nativism, casteism, and the reemergence of antisemitism.
In the weeks after his 2020 defeat, President Trump sought to circumvent the democratic institutions that would allow Democrats to secure civil power and put their leaders into control of the state. He failed. During Modi’s first two terms in office, the prime minister narrowed civil boundaries and constricted civil institutions, and in his third campaign, in 2024, he confidently predicted a BJP majority so massive that it would allow anti- civil, primordial restrictions to be made Constitutional. Unable to secure even a simple majority, Modi was forced to enter into a humbling multiparty alliance. In Europe, there has been a fierce backlash against the multicultural mode of incorporation and eventually against immigration itself. Is it any wonder that, in the midst of these backlash perturbations, public expressions of hatred and violent attacks against Jews have reemerged in Europe and America?
Trump is back in power, threatening ever more dangerous restrictions of the American civil sphere. Prime Minister Modi continues to mount antidemocratic efforts to restrict voting, Muslim rights, and opposition party challenges. The European Union is threatened by reactionary Russian forces from the outside and by far- right populism from within. Against these onslaughts, the universalizing culture and institutions of democratic civil spheres have, so far, retained their resilience. How long they can continue to hold firm is a matter that history will decide.
Notes
1.
“Backlash” has often been deployed by journalists to explain the recent rise of right-wing movements (e.g., Yancy 2018; Faludi 1992; Sharlet 2023; McNamara 2024; Zakaria 2024). When it has been evoked – much less frequently – by empirically oriented social scientists (e.g., Lipset and Raab 1970; Raab 1973; Mansbridge and Shames 2008), it has typically been conceptualized in a reductive manner, as motivated by fears about losing power and status rather than by disruptions to the traditional meanings of social life (for an exception, see Hochschild 2016, 2024). The concept has never, moreover, informed a general social theory about the dynamics of social change. Frontlash is a neologism that, at least in the sense that I deploy it here, is introduced in these pages for the first time. (In Weaver 2007, “frontlash” is used to indicate a specific form of conservative reaction against liberal social change, a reaction that is elite-driven and policy oriented.)
2.
After Lincoln’s assassination, Vice President Andrew Johnson acceded to the presidency, embarking on a reactionary effort to placate the vanquished Southern states and neutralize imminent anti-racist reforms that would expand the Southern civil sphere and guarantee Black citizenship. In response to these backlash efforts, Johnson became the first president ever to be impeached; while not convicted by the Senate, he failed in his effort to gain the Republican nomination for president in 1868. Civil War hero Ulysses S. Grant became the nominee, and, after his election, he organized the Federal government’s ambitious and aggressive frontlash effort at Reconstruction and Black incorporation (Foner 1988; Chernow 2017).
3.
While Obama’s father was African, he was himself born and raised in Hawaii, a state where only one-fifth of the citizens are white.
4.
“Mr. Trump won decisively with a campaign that pitted men against women, sitting down with podcasters who trade in sexism and choosing a running mate who had criticized single women as ‘childless cat ladies.’ Mr. Trump took credit for appointing the Supreme Court justices who overturned the Constitutional right to abortion…. Immediately after the election, social media posts were circulated by men that read, ‘your body, my choice’” (Searcey 2024).
5.
As this example suggests, major movements of frontlash and backlash can sometimes unfold simultaneously. While historical periods are often labeled as progressive or conservative, forces of both reform and reaction are always present in some degree.
1FRONTLASH AND BACKLASH
It is fear and loathing time for the left. Loathing for President Trump, champion of the alt- right forces that, marginalized for decades, are bringing bigotry, patriarchy, nativism, and nationalism back into a visible place in the American civil sphere. Fear that these threatening forces may succeed, that democracy will be destroyed, and that the egalitarian achievements of the last five decades will be lost. Feminism, anti- racism, multiculturalism, sexual citizenship, ecology, and internationalism – all these precarious achievements have come under vicious, persistent attack.
Fear and loathing can be productive when they are unleashed inside the culture and social structures of a civil sphere that remains vigorous, one that sustains a vital center that, even if fragile, continues to hold (Schlesinger 1949; Alexander 2016; Kivisto 2019). In such conditions, a resistance thrives, blocking the victory of Trumpism, dark and brooding as it may be. Trumpism challenges not just the moral and political commitments of the left, but the cultural and social structures of the civil sphere – the sociological underpinning of political democracy (Alexander 2006, 2018).
No matter how horrifying in normative terms, we must understand the polarizing and excluding forces of Trumpism as sociologically “normal” – to the ongoing dynamics of civil spheres. Only when such an anti- leftist force challenges the culture structures and the institutional foundations of civil solidarity does it constitute a truly fundamental danger to democracy. Trumpism has not yet achieved such destructive power. To understand why, we need to look at the big picture: What are the culture and social structures of a civil sphere, and what are the social dynamics it sets in place?
The first thing to recognize is that “Trumpism” and the alt- right are nothing new – not here, not anywhere where civil spheres have been simultaneously enabled and constrained. The depredations of Trumpism are not unique, first- time- in- American- history kinds of things. They are a contemporary manifestation of backlash movements that have challenged progressive social change throughout American history.
Postwar social science has had a bad habit of thinking of social change as linear, a secular trend that is broadly progressive, rooted in the enlightening habits of modernity, education, economic expansion, and the shared social interests of humankind (Marshall 1965; Parsons 1967; Habermas [1981] 1984, 1987; Giddens 1990). From such a perspective, conservative movements appear as deviations, reflecting anomie and isolation (Putnam 2000), unreason (Lipset and Raab 1970), social backwardness, and “empathy walls” (Hochschild 2016).
But modern society never has actually worked in this way. Progress isn’t a secular unfolding; it is triggered by frontlash movements, by avant- gardes whose vision is way ahead of their time, whose actions can be likened to provocative and destabilizing breaching experiments (Garfinkel 1967; Tognato 2019), and whose victories – even when they are small and quiet, but especially when they are big and loud – are experienced as profoundly threatening to vested interests, both ideal and material, not just at the bottom but in the middle and even at the very top of society. Frontlash always produces backlash: movements of cultural, social, and political un- doing that aim to unwind cosmopolitan widening and civil incorporation. Backlash does not occur because conservative cadres and followers are anti- modern, irrational, or unusually bigoted. Backlash is triggered, rather, because ideal and material structures of the status quo have been abruptly displaced, and those who occupied those structures wish to return to the time before displacement, when they were sitting and standing in what was, in their eyes, a much better place.
In the United States, frontlash seared the decade of the 1930s and marked the World War II years as well. Backlash against labor incorporation, challenges to antisemitism and ethnic and racial bigotry, and Ann Randian outrage over Keynesian economic controls exploded with extraordinary force in the late 1940s and dominated the decade after: Taft- Hartley, McCarthyism, stay- at- home mothers, separate- but- equal races, Cold War conformity, and sexual repression. Frontlash exploded again in the 1960s (Kazin 1995: 165–268; Isserman and Kazin 2000), terrifying vested interests, mobilizing counter- elites and long- standing civil society groups alike. In 1968, Richard Nixon rode a backlash crusade into the White House, vowing not only to close the gates of the civil sphere but to reverse civil rights, feminism, ecology, and peace. Facing imminent failure, Nixon tried to effectuate backlash with extra- Constitutional efforts to spy on and blackmail political and electoral opponents – efforts that the Watergate crisis eventually exposed and punished. After a brief post-Watergate period, the backlash movement against civil incorporation resumed, seizing national political power for a dozen years, using the levers of central government and the soapbox of the presidency, trying in every which way to undermine what frontlash movements had achieved, and were continuing to achieve. Yet Reaganism failed to block civil expansion, and conservative paranoia turned ever more cancerous during the eight years of Clinton centrist progressivism. Backlash came roaring back to national power during the administration of Bush the Second: Affirmative action was sharply challenged, feminist policies undermined, environmentalism muted, nationalistic patriotism revived – and militaristic responses to international relations flourished.
The drama of frontlash and backlash continued. Critical sociologists have often written off the Obama years as centrist, neoliberal, even neoconservative. This view was certainly not shared by the white and wounded, the status quo masses and elites. Obama gestured to a post- imperial foreign policy and a post- white, multicultural American ethnicity; he created a massive and inclusive new social entitlement – the Affordable Care Act, aka “Obama Care” (Alexander and Jaworsky 2014); and he was Black! Tens of millions of white Americans experienced the Obama years as frighteningly frontlash. The status quo ante seemed overturned. The experience of laceration triggered another backlash frenzy, this time in Trumpian form. Not new, but still dangerous, it spread fear and loathing on the left.
What threatens democracy is not backlash. Backlash is inevitable when frontlash movements succeed. Introducing once inconceivable reforms in the name of justice, they destabilize established interests. The question is not whether conservative movements will push back – for they do, and often successfully – but whether, when they do, the civil sphere can survive.
Democracy depends on feelings of mutual regard, on experiencing a shared solidarity despite deep antipathies of interest and ideology. There must be some historically specific vision of a shared universalism that transcends the particularisms of class, race, gender, sex, region, religion, and ethnicity. Because frontlash and backlash are highly polarizing, their phenomenological effect is to induce high anxiety that civil solidarity is breaking apart. What once seemed civil – affirmative action, for example – now seems particularistic. Groups and ideas once honored – Confederate heroes, for example – are now trashed. Can the sense of a vital center survive? Only if civil solidarity can regulate ideal and material conflict in such a manner that enemies become frenemies, that sharp antagonism is moderated and agonism thrives (Mouffe 2000). Frontlash must be so civil- ized that it eschews revolution for social democracy (Marshall 1965).1 Backlash unfolds under an anti- left, conservative ideology, but such conservatism can take a civil or anti- civil form.
Burke ([1790] 2009) and Oakeshott (1975) were backlash philosophers of civil moderation: don’t hurry so fast, they warned the left; don’t be so arrogant as to see yourself as the master of rationality; do be more concerned with maintaining trust and incremental ties. When backlash takes more extreme form, however, conservative ideology becomes not moderately anti- radical but revolutionary: from agonism to antagonism, from persuasion to violence, from civil sphere to civil war, and from democracy to authoritarianism. If backlash had boiled over in the 1960s, you would have had Malcolm X and the Black Panthers as the decade’s dominant political figures and organizations, not Martin Luther King and the NAACP. If backlash boils over today, we will have Steve Bannon as the nation’s dominant public intellectual (Chapter 3, below), Fox News as the dominant source of journalistic truth, and white racism as the avowed platform of the Republican Party.
While Trump often speaks in the tones of Bannon’s ideological radicalism, during his first term he was compelled to govern in the name of mainstream conservative backlash. Civil conservatives sustained Trump because they were able to use his presidency to push back against the frontlash achievements of decades before. Trump has “done more to deregulate than any president in history,” explained the president of Freedom Works, citing a long- standing conservative policy goal (Peters 2018: 16). A regressive tax bill; broad attacks on women’s rights, such as the conservative Supreme Court’s abolition of the national right to abortion; the same Court’s new restrictions on affirmative action; criticisms of sexual freedom, gender neutrality, and voting rights – each of these developments undermined what citizens on the left had come to understand as the contemporary American civil sphere. Yet even as such pushbacks undermined the progressive version of the American civil sphere, they were not aimed at destroying the civil sphere as such; they did not abrogate the rules of the electoral game that mandated agonistic over antagonistic conflict or the legal- rational principles of civil regulation.
Trump’s rhetoric is inflammatory in tone and demagogic in style, but is it actually antidemocratic, as leading social theories of populism suggest (Arditi 2005; Mouffe 2005; Panizza 2005; Müller 2017)? Trump rails against false news and those who hide the truth, describing his own side as rational and honest. He calls his enemies liars and presents himself as the ultimate truth- teller. He attacks selfishness and brags about his own generosity. He claims to expose secret shenanigans and portrays his administration as open for all to see. He attacks elites and privilege, setting himself on the people’s side and vowing to enlarge the rules of the game.
What we see here is the tried- and- true binary discourse of civil society, a discourse that, from the very beginning of American democracy, dynamized and polarized, enabled and constrained actually existing civil spheres (Kivisto 2017, 2019; Mast 2019a, 2019b; Enroth 2021). Every powerful democratic leader, on both right and left (Kazin 2006), has evoked the same binaries to suggest that their opponents are civilly incapable and that only they and their friends are willing and able to act on behalf of the civil side – to be rational, autonomous, open, cooperative, people- oriented, solidaristic.
Our clear and present danger does not emerge from the simplifying, binary rhetoric of civil versus uncivil, however ideologically upsetting such right- wing performances may be. It comes, rather, from how such inveterate binarism relates to the civil sphere institutions that sustain democratic life. It is certainly a frustrating paradox that civil solidarity cannot be instantiated in real time and place without resorting to what the psychoanalysts call “splitting” (Klein [1957] 1975; cf. Guralnik 2024), or what Strong Program cultural sociologists call the sacred- versus- profane binaries that make meaning possible in everyday social life (Alexander and Smith 2019). Even as binarism incorporates and upgrades, it excludes and degrades. The binary structure of civil discourse means that the specification of civil solidarity, at any particular historical time and in any particular physical place, is inherently precarious. But the flexibility of splitting and the precariousness of specification are precisely what allow “actually existing” civilities to be continuously expanded, and actually existing civil spheres to be continuously remade by avant- gardes, sometimes in startlingly progressive and emancipatory ways. They are also what allow the frontiers of newly expanded civil spheres to be challenged, and sometimes even unmade – by backlash.
The making and unmaking of civil solidarity, its upgrading and downgrading, depend on specifying its idealistic discourse in relation to ongoing events and struggles in particular times and places. This is the work of civil institutions. The communicative and regulative institutions of the civil sphere mediate between broad and abstract binary discourses and the here and now. Public opinion polls, civil associations, and fictional and factual media – most importantly, journalism – are institutions of communication. They specify democratic values and discourses on behalf of civil solidarity, issuing highly public judgments about the civil and uncivil character of interests, groups, movements, and events, judgments that are independent of popular leaders and parties – whether frontlash or backlash – who claim to speak for the people directly, in unmediated fashion, in and of and for themselves. The other filtering mechanisms are regulative: the institutions of voting and electoral competition, the impersonal structure of office, and, most of all, the precedent- bound and rightsbased rule of law (see Chapter 2, below).
The elites who organize and represent these communicative and regulative institutions are civil sphere agents (Alexander 2018). Their ideal and material interests are at one with the defense of the civil sphere’s autonomy. Civil sphere agents mediate the charismatic claims of demagogues, intertwining interpretation and coercion, producing universalizing, quasi- factual evidence that allows them to pollute, arrest, and sometimes even incarcerate the civil sphere’s enemies. Investigative journalists and crusading attorneys are ambitious for glory. Their hopes to become civil heroes can be stymied by populist demagogues, on right and left, who believe that only they themselves can speak for the people – in immediate rather than mediate ways; as vessels for, rather than instruments of, civil power; as the only true representatives of the people’s will.
What is truly dangerous about Trumpism is not that it speaks, sometimes viciously, the polarizing and binary language of civil backlash, but that it often seems hell- bent on destroying the autonomy of civil sphere institutions along the way. The Trump- whisperer Stephen Bannon tells his boss: you are the sole arbiter of where and to whom the discourse of civil society applies; you are the king’s mystical and administrative body (Kantorowicz 1957; Reed 2019); you are not a civil conservative moderate but an anti- civil revolutionary.
Trump- whispering can move backlash from civil conservative to far- right populist. When the representational process comes to be centered in a single man rather than in relatively independent communicative institutions, you have Caesarism (Weber 1978; Baehr and Richter 2004; Baehr 2008). When symbolic power suddenly seems merely plebiscitarian, it is the modern Prince (Gramsci 1959) who crystallizes the voice of the people, via his media, his associations, his own constructions of polls, his judges and courts, his political party. Buoyed by such presumption of people power, the populist demagogue not only monopolizes the power of symbolic representation (Moffitt 2016) but also destroys the organizational autonomy of regulative institutions (Botello 2021). Extremist populists, whether right or left, cannot tolerate independent courts interpreting and applying civil discourse (Llausas and Devia- Valbuena 2024). They cannot allow powerful media elites to decide who and what is more rational, more honest, more true, more secretive, more hidden, or more dangerous and threatening. As the regulation of impersonal office is destroyed, power becomes personal and familial, and corruption reigns.2 Patrimonialism, deference, and the king’s mystical body are the alternatives to civil power, to Constitutionally regulated office, and to critical independent mediation. With office and journalism destroyed, elections become empty showcases for staging dramaturgic demagoguery instead of occasions for engaging in contingent, agonistic, aesthetic- cum- moral deployments of binary discourse.
Under such conditions of discursive constriction and institutional de- differentiation (Alexander and Colomy 1990), the possibilities for a universalizing solidarity become severely constrained. Civil spheres shrink, reflecting primordial qualities of the party that has grabbed representational power, reflecting the ethnicity, gender, race, and sexual identity of the would- be presidential king. Backlash and frontlash are no longer dynamic. Instead of moments in the pendulum swing of social and cultural history, they become puncta (Barthes 1981) – points that halt the movement and threaten to break the marvelously subtle, powerful but flexible, finely tuned but precarious democratic “machine.”
Yet if civil spheres can be populized into antidemocracies, such destruction does not happen in the blink of an eye. Even as conservative forces push backward to demagoguery, the cultural and institutional bases of civil spheres react. Protecting their ideal and material interests, civil elites defend the autonomy of critical discourse, the right of independent journalism to make interpretations regardless of personal power, the claim for such judgments to be practically applied by independent judges and by courts whose legitimacy rests upon Constitutional rights.3
In substantive terms, today’s progressive resistance is a fight to maintain what frontlash has gained, allowing humane and solidaristic representations of gender, sex, ethnicity, and race to become more widely distributed and more fully institutionalized. In more formal terms, resistance proceeds by defending the structure and culture of the contemporary civil sphere – the independence of civil associations, the objective measurement of public opinion, the professionalism of journalism, the authority of judges, fair voting rules, and impersonal standards of justice. It is not rhetorical representatives of “the people” who lead the resistance, much less the people themselves (e.g., Laclau 2005), but civil sphere elites and their supporters, groups whose ideal and material interests are bound to the civil and mediated construction of an expanded version of national solidarity (Rubin 2021).
It is unfortunate that sociologists have so rarely been interested in theorizing democracy, and that when they have done so, they (e.g., Bourdieu 1996) have mostly failed to comprehend the cultural and institutional complexities that sustain it. Like the radical populists who are the civil sphere’s enemies, sociologists too often have reduced democracy to material interests (Lipset [1960] 1981); to the struggles of masses against power elites (Michels [1911] 1962; Schumpeter [1942] 1975; Mills 1956; Moore 1966); to the triumph of less privileged over more privileged classes (Wright 2015); to grassroots civic activism against institutions and states (Putnam 2000; Skocpol 2003); to public action against private greed (Habermas [1963] 1989). Such misunderstandings (Laclau 2005) have the unintended effect of conflating democracy and populism, thus ceding the intellectual – if not the moral – ground to democracy’s enemies. Sociology becomes part of the polarization between frontlash and backlash, rather than standing back from both with critical understanding. The heart of democracy is not serving this or that particular interest, but having the sense of a broader interest. It is to cherish a faith that solidarity can be defined in a civil rather than primordial manner, as these definitions are specified in any particular historical time and place.
Trying to make some things and people more civil always involves defining some other people and things as less, which necessarily evokes the binary discourse over which Trump has proven himself to be a rhetorical master. The problem is hardly an American one, however. Over the course of the last decade, there has been increasing moral unease, emotional anxiety, and social instability throughout the democratic world. Feeding off this combustible bile, antidemocratic movements have flourished; newly liberal governments have become “illiberal democracies”; and, in even the most stable democratic capitalist and social democratic nations, liberty has become threatened. The challenge is to prevent the rhetoric that exposes the putative lack of civility of those on the right, or left, from becoming concentrated in the representational capacities of a leader and party. The representation of civil capacity must be disbursed among the communicative and regulative institutions that filter, pluralize, and agonistically specify the principles that allow incorporation and exclusion. For, as John Dewey ([1916] 1966: 87) argued over a century ago, “more than a form of government,” democracy is “primarily a mode of associational living, of conjoint communicated experience.”
Notes
1.
In his philosophical history of how liberalism fructified democracy in the dark times of twentieth-century Communism and fascism, Joshua Cherniss describes how “social-democratic liberalism … appealed to solidarity and civic responsibility and championed the active exercise of political freedoms,” insisting that “it remained liberalism – a vision of politics defined by the limitation of power and the protection of rights” (Cherniss 2021: 69–70).
2.
Trump had “sought to destroy the machinery of governing and transform the presidential office into personal rule. [This] is a frontal attack on proceduralism, which is essential to the administrative state’s authority. The rule of law, as well as the law of rules – the
ethos
