Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

" All you need to gain access to socialism for white people is a good corporate or government job. That fact helps explain how this welfare system took shape sixty years ago, why it was originally (and still overwhelmingly) white, and why white Rust Belt voters showed far more enthusiasm for Donald Trump than for Bernie Sanders. White voters are not interested in democratic socialism. They want to restore their access to a more generous and dignified program of white socialism." Interesting, but equally interesting is the writer's concept of "socialism".

" Ideas and words are often products of their time. That is certainly true of heterosexuality, which was borne out of a time when American life was becoming more regularised. As Blank argues, the invention of heterosexuality corresponds with the rise of the middle class." (BBC online) The invention of 'heterosexuality'

" Hitler's disdain for the complacency of the 'old' bourgeoisie was life-long. But he honoured thrusting meritocrats. Notably, one of Hitler's early and long-standing heroes was the United States automobile magnate, Henry Ford, whom he lauded for his entrepreneurial brilliance and rabid anti-Semitism . Indeed, the Führer celebrated the entrepreneur as a bearer of racial superiority in any national population , and had nothing but contempt for democ­racy in the economy. For example, Hitler rebuked Otto Strasser, an anti-free-market Nazi, in 1930: 'The capitalists have worked their way to the top through their capacity, and on the basis of this selection, which again only proves their higher race, they have a right to lead.' Faced with the prospect of social turmoil or even Communist revolution, the German middle classes were willing to be cajoled by Hitler. The Protestant theolo­gian, Paul Tillich, writing in 1933, anxiously observed the bourgeoisie ready

Class and Politcs in Post-Revolutionary Iran A brief introduction

Sisi's Egypt

Trump and Fascism. A View from the Past A historian's analysis

Everyone in India thinks they are 'middle class' and almost no one actually is

To understand where the so-called liberal democracy stands since ots inception and why the BB has just called one Islamist preacher "one of the most dangerous men in Britain", one should read a historical account. "From the 1970s, however, liberal revolution revived on an unprecedented scale. With the collapse of communism, bourgeois liberty once again became a crusading, force, but now on a global scale. In the twenty-first century, the armed forces of the United States, Britain, and NATO became instruments of 'regime change', seeking to destroy dictatorship and build free-market democracies. President George W. Bush called the invasion of Iraq in 2003 a 'watershed event in the global democratic revolution'. This was an extraordinary turn-around, with the middle classes now hailed as the truly universal class which, in emancipating itself, emancipates all society. The debacle in Iraq, and the Great Recession from 2008, revealed all too clearly that hu

The Middle East and North Africa "Why do governments last? What kind of governments last? Increasingly, studies on the stability of regimes in the Middle East/North Africa region focus on how elites enfold the middle and working classes into socio-political orders. Such enfoldment happens through turning the state into not merely an instrument of violent class rule through extraction, but also part-and-parcel of everyday social reproduction." Critical Readings in Political Economies: Resilience

"What does it mean that Trump has done well among middle-income and higher-income voters but not the most-educated? This suggests that his real base of support is small-business owners, supervisory and middle-management employees, franchisees, landlords, real estate agents, propertied farmers, and so on: those who are not at the executive pinnacle of corporate America (who largely have MBAs and other similar degrees) and those who are not credentialed professionals (doctors, lawyers, and the like), but the much wider swath of those people whose livelihood is derived from independent business activity or middle-band positions in the corporate hierarchy." From Slump to Trump

Poll: UK Class Divide is 'Alive and Well'