Benjamin von Wyl
Just six days after the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, prominent historian Quinn Slobodian and Harvard political scientist William Callison tried to make sense of what had happened in the Boston Review. Just who were the insurgents who had stormed and vandalised the Capitol building? The brightly painted Vikings and cowboys didn’t fit the usual image of far-right vandals. They seemed more like people who wanted to be perceived as individuals.
Slobodian and Callison recognised a political dynamic among many of those involved in the riots which they called “diagonalism”. They coined the term from the term “diagonal thinkers”, as the radical opponents of Covid-19 pandemic measures in German-speaking countries called themselves.
“At the extreme end, diagonal movements share a conviction that all power is conspiracy,” Slobodian and Callison wrote. Many of them believe that public power cannot be legitimate. In many ways, they are “descendants of the extra-parliamentary New Social Movements of the 1970s” who have shifted from left to right – without idealism or the desire for collective action and liberation.
Slobodian and Callison also referred to a study by the University of Basel, led by the sociologist Oliver Nachtwey, on the radical opponents of Covid-19 measures.
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