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Halfway into White Noise, Don DeLillo's novel from 1985, Jack Gladney packs his family in the car and leaves town running from a black chemical cloud. The "airborne toxic event" had triggered an emergency evacuation plan: floodlights from helicopters, sirens, unmarked cars from obscure agencies, clogged roads, makeshift shelters at a Boy Scout camp where the Red Cross would dispense juice and coffee. People are confused, they seek information wherever they can, "[s]mall crowds collected around certain men." Among generalized bewilderment, Gladney observes a few individuals moving faster and more assertively than the rest, then getting into a Land Rover. In the chaotic scene of crisis, their confidence gets his attention. "Their bumper stickers read GUN CONTROL IS MIND CONTROL" Gladney reads. And his mind wanders: "In situations like this, you want to stick close to people in right-wing fringe groups. They've practiced staying alive." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Halfway into White Noise, Don DeLillo's novel from 1985, Jack Gladney packs his family in the car and leaves town running from a black chemical cloud. The "airborne toxic event" had triggered an emergency evacuation plan: floodlights from helicopters, sirens, unmarked cars from obscure agencies, clogged roads, makeshift shelters at a Boy Scout camp where the Red Cross would dispense juice and coffee. People are confused, they seek information wherever they can, "[s]mall crowds collected around certain men." Among generalized bewilderment, Gladney observes a few individuals moving faster and more assertively than the rest, then getting into a Land Rover. In the chaotic scene of crisis, their confidence gets his attention. "Their bumper stickers read GUN CONTROL IS MIND CONTROL" Gladney reads. And his mind wanders: "In situations like this, you want to stick close to people in right-wing fringe groups. They've practiced staying alive." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analogies between the rise of Donald Trump in the United States and populist leaders in Latin America are an emblematic case of misleading comparative analysis. They hide the ideological core of Trumpism, which undermines collective action and its emblematic institution, organized labor, dismantling the protections it attained during the twentieth century. In particular, references to Argentina's Juan Perón obscure Trump's emphasis on individual economic freedom, property rights, and the naturalization of inequality, values engrained in American political thinking. They also distort the populist legacies in Latin America. Populist leaders in the postwar years challenged liberal democratic thinking by posing that social rights and collective prerogatives for excluded groups should prevail over individual citizenship in order to expand political democracy. That legacy is not only alien to Trumpism; it might also be the main weapon to fight against it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It argues that majority of the left-wing Latin American administrations are showing progressive and democratizing characteristics. It puts into a global context that process as having fundamentally positive structural characteristics. It outlines the international neoconservative hyperpolitical regime adopted by the Bush administration after the 9/11 terrorist attack. It also discusses the ways in which Latin American administrations have shown democratization efforts and international pro-rule law characteristics that tend to oppose neoliberal and political neoconservative inclinations. It outlines areas in which the New Latin American left has been advancing to counterbalance the current US foreign policy and neoliberal global right.