Lest you think that theory is something that is relegated to the realm of the academic, take a look at this piece from the NYT this morning from the excellent “The Stone” series of short philosophical pieces. The authors, Abigail Levin and Lisa Guenther, argue that Trumpism draws its energies not from fringe interest groups that are part of a panoply of pluralist special interests, but from a reconstruction of politics itself that relies on a distinction between a racial “nation” and a merely mechanical “state.” The key term here is “possession”: whites, in this ideology, view their whiteness as a possession that must be defended against diabolical “others,” and this faith in their own possession of whiteness conveniently inverts the historical reality that white power stems from dispossession of those very “others” (e.g., the expropriation of Indian land, the reduction of Africans to chattel). Good stuff, and indicative of the kinds of things we’ll think about in the second major part of the course on power and ideology.