America's dark harbingers: a genealogical analysis of self-disposing right-wing subjects during the pandemic

• Published in: Culture, theory and critique theory and critique, 2022-01, Vol.63 (1), p.81-99
• Main Author: Brown, Austin McNeill
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Biopolitics; Contingencies; COVID; COVID-19; Crises; Genealogy; Health behavior; Imposition; Liberal democracy; Libertarianism; Neoliberalism; Pandemics; Public health; Right wing politics; right-wing; subjectivation
• ISSN: 1473-5784; 1473-5776
• DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2022.2098151

This essay will review the emergence of the anti-public health practices of politically motivated individuals during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Thousands of Americans, largely part of the far-right and libertarian front, have died due to their insistence on 'freedom' from the imposition of public health and vaccine mandates. In the abstract, I define these as self-disposing political subjects. The historical factors which compose such political characteristics are discursively rooted in the shifting economic interests of elite donor classes under neoliberal arrangements of society. This analysis will examine the emergence, pre-existing factors, and the contingencies out of which these practices have come about as an outcome of dominant power and neoliberal relations perfected through biopolitical and psychopolitical technologies. The target of this analysis will be to understand the multiple contingencies from which these self-destructive acts of political resistance come from, how they express neoliberalism in times of crisis and what we might expect as we face a future defined by climate crisis, and the receding waters of liberal democracy.