Wired for Authoritarianism: American Oligarchies and How to Re-Wire America for the People (Universalizing Resistance)

In contrast to much of the current literature that treats Trump’s authoritarianism as new and singular, this book shows that authoritarianism in the United States instead has a long history that explains the extent to which authoritarianism has been embraced by large sections of US voters. Wired for Authoritarianism combines historical analysis with an innovative conceptual analysis of the “wiring” of power, drawing on the study of the power elite developed by the sociologist C.Wright Mills and neo-Marxist literature. Connecting the social and political culture of the elite to the ideas of state and societal capture, as well as novel concepts of covert and overt wiring of power, this book argues that the Trump era has moved America from a long-standing, mainly covert authoritarian structure toward a more dominant and overt authoritarianism - from a position in which oligarchs exercise power from outside of official government positions, to one in which corporate oligarchs are directly