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Manna From Hell: Power and Politics from Region to World Power

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This series of narrative essays traces the emergence of an American political culture from the landscape of Los Angeles, which rose to become the dominant, populist New Right movement of the late 20th and early 21st century.  Its rise to predominance is impossible to miss.  Its leaders, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, both built their public lives in Los Angeles.  Their careers were built on patterns of power and politics that were forged mainly in the 8th Regional Regime (1880s-1940), which was deeply shaped by the Mexican Revolution (1910-1929).  The pillars of Los Angeles political culture were oil, militarism, pulp fascist propaganda, and apartheid.

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The title of this series of essays refers to petroleum.  Los Angeles has been a mighty metropolis in this Age of Oil.  Lying in abundance beneath the Los Angeles Basin, oil became a pillar of Angeleno social and political power.  The autocratic, militaristic, anti-democratic political culture of Los Angeles drank oil like blood.   For countless millennia, oil lay deep in the Earth.  A curse of great richness, petroleum is Satan's sinister gift to humankind: “Manna from Hell.”   Oil, the entombed remains of ancient living flora and fauna, fueled great fortunes of a few: the transportation revolution; the industrial productivity and warfare of the 20th century; turned nation-states against one another; generated world wars, and in the late 20th century, superseded even the Communist-Capitalist world polarization, with a new one: jihadist Islam versus the West and the very oil-based Arab sheikdoms that gave birth to jihad.

These essays narrate the political struggles that eventually produced a world-spanning political movement called the New Right in the United States, also called "neoliberalism" worldwide.  Each essay follows the specific activities and contests for leadership and power by specific individuals.  While highly specific, these are stories are also about the rise of a distinctive, highly racialized and authoritarian political culture, embodied first by Richard Nixon, and its impact on the city, the nation, and the globe.  The essays range, thus, in scale, from the local to the national to the transnational to the the global. 

This page has paths:

  1. Narrative Paths Phil Ethington
  2. Networks Phil Ethington

Contents of this path:

  1. Manna From Hell: Petroleum and the Inscription of Angeleno World Power, 1890s-1930s
  2. The Mexican Revolution, The Los Angeles Metropolis, and American Political Culture, 1880s-1920s
  3. Air , Space, and Cinematic Power: Los Angeles the Military-Industrial Capital of the 20th Century
  4. Richard 37th: Nixon, Los Angeles, and World Power
  5. Race, Space, Violence, and Voting: 1964, 1978, 1994
  6. Reaganism and Rebellion: The American Uprising of 1988-1992
  7. Bibliography for Manna From Hell Path