JRWS, vol. 3, iss. 1 (2025)

I n the five months since the Trump administration has come to power, people are absorbing its insults to liberal democracy, to individual and collective rights, in a way that recalls Victor Klemperer's day-by-day tally of the mounting web of restrictions on Jews in 1930s Germany.Media, universities, law firms, judges, and others are finding themselves forced into concessions in the face of sometimes existential threats.In a particularly vile irony, ideological extortion of universities has proceeded by defining freespeech criticism of Israel's war crimes in Gaza as "antisemitism."Authoritarianism's red line was crossed when immigrants and foreign students were whisked off streets into often distant detention, including in proudly displayed concentration-camp-like imprisonment abroad.The deployment of combat Marines to Los Angeles, current as this is written, is an "emergency" foretold.And all this is administered by spectacularly ignorant officials who, for example, have no idea what habeas corpus means.(See Noem, Kristi)Meantime, the administration is turning back the clock to cancel not merely the reforms and government apparatus that began with the New Deal (which radical freemarket Republicans have been after for almost a century); but they are now reaching beyond to cancel the Progressive Era of the turn of the twentieth century, the years that gave Americans the Federal Reserve, the progressive income tax, women's right to vote, and more.Trump's giddy improvisations on tariffs have the aim of returning the US to regressive taxation, yawning economic inequality, and massive corruption and enrichment on the part of oligarchs.Before the Progressive Era, the oligarchs came from emerging industries like railroads, oil, and steel.Today's oligarchs are seizing AI, crypto, and quantum computing; and Trump's personal participation in this primitive accumulation at the dawn of what may be a new economic era is a particularly grotesque and revealing spectacle.Abroad as well, the late nineteenth century model obtains: the US is talking about territorial expansion, raw materials, and the absence of international regulation and law.Earlier it was called the Gilded Age-oligarchical gold leaf wrapped around an immiserated population.In the opening sentence of his second inaugural address Trump promised that "the golden age of America begins right now."A mere veneer of gold, it seems, is no longer enough.Trumpism in the USA is the leading example of similar transformations that are either in power around the globe or knocking at the door.In these circumstances the urgency of work in the field of right-wing studies speaks for itself.We are pleased that with this issue of the Journal of Right-Wing Studies we are entering our third year of publication.We hope for its wide circulation not only among the expanding number of right-wing studies scholars but among concerned readers everywhere.