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Book review: Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right‐Wing Politics of Precarity (2019), Daniel MartinezHoSang and Joseph E.Lowndes, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

In the present-day Trump-era, the expansion and proliferation of domestic right-wing terrorism is at the forefront of national and international concerns about the current state of US politics. At the time of writing, the USA is in the midst of another election cycle that will culminate in November, determining whether or not Trump will continue as acting president for an additional 4 years. Trump’s largely unanticipated election win in 2016 led many to question the values and priorities of those who voted for him. Of particular interest to many was the support that he received from groups that he actively discriminated against during his speeches, informal discussions and legislation reform proposals, including women, Mexicans and people with disabilities. HoSang and Lowndes argue that their support for Trump, as well as a number of political projects that have largely been associated with the far-right, has drawn attention to a new politics that allows for the possibility of these demographics to converge and find common ideological ground. This, the authors argue, is furthered by the far-right’s utilisation of rhetoric concerning political freedom that has historically been associated with the political left. Throughout the book HoSang and Lowndes refer to a series of binaries that have formed racial categories in the USA and ensured the continuation of a racial hierarchy in capitalist systems, including: ‘[a]utonomy versus dependency, producer versus parasite, virtue versus vice, individual versus collective, and fitness versus weakness’ (p. 12). By drawing critical attention to the use of these binaries in contemporary conservative politics the authors outline how they have ‘been mutually constituted through the formation of Blackness and whiteness in the post-New Deal era, along with the concomitant . . . emergence of the broadly accepted moral authority of the mainstream civil rights movement’ (p. 12). In doing so, they argue that whiteness as a historical site of privilege that operates at both institutional and systemic levels no longer automatically protects white people from ‘civic failure’ and ‘social abandonment’ (p. 14). Rather, because of the entangled ways in which far-right and leftist politics have emerged in the USA over recent years, stereotypical assumptions about black people as ‘parasitic’ in relation to what many view as their ‘overdependency’ on state-funded assistance programmes have now come to be associated with white people who ’unjustly’ benefit from them. In chapter 1, the authors analyse cultural depictions of race that were used against employees in the public sector during the Great Recession. Using a series of visual and auditory measures that were strategically employed to negatively shape public opinion, they show how ‘constructions of parasitism have become transposed onto white public-sector workers . . . who have traditionally been exempt from such charges’ (p. 16). In chapter 2, the authors examine how white political identity has become ‘inhabited and politically invoked in the context of long-term abandonment’ (p. 16). In chapter 3, the authors discuss the rise of Black politicians in the Republican party and other conservative groups, arguing that this move signals an unprecedented alliance between this demographic and white people. In chapter 4, the authors comment on the recent rise of far-right nationalism in the USA, and examine the current role and influence of people of colour in white supremacist groups. They argue that white supremacy is ‘increasingly shored up by symbols, narratives, and visible participation of people of colour’ who, through their visibility, call into question how the ideological underpinnings of white supremacy has made room for people who have not only traditionally been excluded from these groups but also directly targeted by them. In chapter 5, the authors discuss the much publicised 2016 armed occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon,