E25: Fascism & Demagoguery (w/ CV Vitolo-Haddad)

Update - 9/21/2020: Since this episode was released, CV has been involved in a controversy surrounding their presentation of their racial/ethnic identity for their advancement in activism and scholarship. We encourage our listeners to read the initial Medium post calling attention to these issues, as well as the response posts (1 and 2) issued by CV. While this interview was conducted over a year before these issues came to light - and the subject of CV’s identity was not broached in this conversation - it bears emphasis that we at re:verb do not condone CV’s actions in any way, and regard the misrepresentation of their identity as deceitful and harmful to the broader scholarly community.

With that being said, our podcast’s mission, now as always, has been to provide critical context on public issues that will help lead to more generative dialogues on these topics. We are not removing this episode from our catalogue because we believe that it is (and can still be) part of a wider public conversation surrounding anti-racist, decolonial scholarship and activism. The goal of this conversation, specifically, was to dissect and better understand the logics of right-wing white supremacist demagoguery, and we still believe many of the points touched upon in this episode are valid. We hope, however, that our listeners will engage with this episode in a critically informed manner, knowing what there is to know publicly about our interviewee and their scholarship.

On today’s show, Alex and Calvin discuss demagoguery and far-right rhetoric with CV Vitolo-Haddad, a doctoral candidate in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the Director of Debate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In particular, we discuss CV’s recent publication in Rhetoric Society Quarterly - “The Blood of Patriots: Symbolic Violence and “The West” - which focuses on the rhetoric of the far-right group known as the “Proud Boys.”

This article explores how the Proud Boys are motivated by an imagined, at-risk spatial terrain of whiteness known as “the West” (or “Western civilization”). In our discussion, CV explains what such groups’ demagogic rhetoric can teach us about the paradoxes of demagoguery more broadly: from their vacillation between a rhetoric of strength and violence to one of victimization and precarity, to their attachment to “a libertarian aesthetic of freedom” which often occludes their truly authoritarian politics. We also discuss the pros and cons of publicly debating the far-right, with CV sharing some best practices from direct experience.

Works & Concepts Cited in this Episode

Roberts-Miller, P. (2017). Demagoguery and democracy. The Experiment.

Roberts-Miller, P. (2019). Rhetoric and demagoguery. SIU Press.

Vitolo-Haddad, C. V. (2019). The blood of patriots: Symbolic violence and “the west”. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 49(3), 280-296.

Walden, D. (2018, 28 June). Dismantling the “west.” Current Affairs. Retrieved from: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/06/dismantling-the-west

CV’s Twitter

CV’s Medium