“IT’S NOT YOUR iDENTITARIANISM I OBJECT TO…”

The Rise of the Conservative Left: As the political left gets more progressive, it’s leaving behind the very people it used to champion, prompting them to search for new leaders (Michael C. Behrent, Oct 09, 2024, Discourse)

The trajectory of the left can, historically, be plotted along two axes. Temporally, the left tries to push society toward greater justice and equality, hastening the work of progress. Socially, it champions the interests of workers and ordinary people as opposed to elites. Most of the time, these axes harmonize: Political, social and cultural progress often advances the interests of society’s lower ranks. In the past, this has meant that political movements seeking to further the interests of ordinary people have tended to be liberal or progressive.

Yet in recent years, a very different situation has emerged. Ordinary people are less and less convinced that the progress progressives are offering is working in their favor. They worry not only about economic forces threatening their way of life—such as globalization, deindustrialization and automation—but also about ideologies hailing from universities and urban centers that classify their beliefs as old-fashioned and even abhorrent. Consequently, many nonelites have gravitated from the left to the right, particularly toward populist parties that, over the past decade, have flourished in many countries. In these circumstances, a space has emerged, almost by default, for an unusual political stance: a conservative left.

…it’s that you’re not valorizing my Identity.”

BETWEEN IRRESPONSIBILITY AND EUGENICS HE’S THE FACE OF ABORTION:

Trump Becomes a Pro-Choice Champion… for Florida’s Abortion Rights Movement (Marc A. Caputo, Oct 11, 2024, The Bulwark)

MOVE OVER, MARGARET SANGER. The new face of abortion rights in Florida is . . . Donald Trump?

One of the groups backing Florida’s abortion-rights initiative is trying to attract Trump voters with mailers and a soon-to-be-released digital ad that highlights the former president’s opposition to the state’s existing six-week abortion ban.

JUST DON’T CALL IT SYSTEMIC:

Police stop more Black drivers, while speed cameras issue unbiased tickets − new study from Chicago (The Conversation, September 27, 2024)

Our research, published in June 2024, used data on the racial composition of drivers on every street in Chicago. We then compared who is driving on roads with who is being ticketed by the city’s speed cameras and who is being stopped by the Chicago police.

Our findings show that when speed cameras are doing the ticketing, the proportion of tickets issued to Black and white drivers aligns closely with their respective share of roadway users. With human enforcement, in contrast, police officers stop Black drivers at a rate that far outstrips their presence on the road.

For instance, on roads where half of drivers are Black, Black drivers receive approximately 54% of automated camera citations. However, they make up about 70% of police stops.

On roadways where half of the drivers are white, white drivers account for around half of automated citations – and less than 20% of police stops.

JUST DON’T CALL IT SYSTEMIC:

The Downstream Effects of Fixing a Racist Lung Test (Felice J. Freyer, Harvard Public Health, 09.24.2024, UnDark)

Before, the computer program that assessed lung function sorted patients into one of four categories: Caucasian, Black, Asian, or Hispanic. It automatically lowered the threshold for what is “normal” for Black and Asian patients. It’s a startling example of how racial bias has literally been written into the machinery of 21st-century health care and how formulas based on supposed racial differences have skewed decision-making in many corners of medicine. Boston Medical Center is among the institutions working to address this problem, after an April 2023 recommendation by the American Thoracic Society that laboratories adopt a race-neutral algorithm, or set of rules, for assessments. But with thousands of lung-function laboratories and clinics scattered across the country, the movement for change faces manifold obstacles and thorny consequences.

Applying the race-neutral algorithm means broadly that Black patients will be deemed sicker and White ones healthier than before. A higher proportion of Black people (and, to a lesser extent, Asians) will be designated impaired — which could make them ineligible for certain occupations but increase their access to disability benefits, additional testing, and referral for lung transplants. White people will experience the opposite, with some potentially seeing their disability benefits reduced or eliminated.

MAGA IS SO EUROPEAN:

The forging of countries: Two distinct and conflicting forms of nationalism – civic and ethnic – helped create the nation-states of Europe (Luka Ivan Jukićis, 9/20/24, Aeon)

Only in the decades after 1871 did this idea that civic borders should conform to ‘objective’ national ones based on ethnic criteria come to prominence. Importantly, it arose with the maturity of nationalist movements, not at their birth. […]

Today, it feels vaguely accurate to say that countries like the US, the UK or France base their national identity on the ‘civic’ nationhood of common citizenship. Poland, Hungary, Czechia or even Russia, on the other hand, appear wedded to a more ethnic idea of nationhood rooted in a common language, traditions and myths of origin.

The ethno-state is just Darwinist.

A+ HEADLINE:

Tucker Carlson and the Beer Hall Putz: The logical conclusion of the “redpill” mentality that’s increasingly prevalent on the right. (Cathy Young, Sep 09, 2024, The Bulwark)

In the Free Press, Sohrab Ahmari (attempting to don a new centrist hat in his latest political pivot) describes Carlson’s praise of Cooper as a manifestation of the “Barbarian Right,” more or less overtly racist and preoccupied with racial hierarchies. The “Barbarian Right,” writes Ahmari, is characterized by the conviction that one is championing facts and ideas suppressed by the establishment—things they don’t want you to think and to know. Its distinctive features also include “revulsion for the mildly egalitarian conservatism that took hold across the West in the postwar period,” a conservatism that accepted the civil rights movement and that “marginalized Jew-haters.” Indeed, Ahmari notes, Carlson’s interview of Cooper shows “how far the Barbarian Right will go in seeking to delegitimize the actually existing American order.”

It’s an accurate observation, but the rot goes beyond the hardcore racialist right. The “redpill” mentality which holds that everything you’ve been told by the “establishment” and the “elites” is a lie—and of which World War II revisionism and Holocaust denial are arguably the logical conclusion—has become fairly standard in right-wing and “heterodox” circles. So has distaste for the “actually existing” American and Western order. Here’s a startling example: In July 2021, Tablet, the Jewish online magazine which in the past several years has increasingly drifted from pluralistic centrism toward nationalist/populist conservatism, published an article, based on its author’s viral Twitter thread, in defense of Donald Trump’s “stolen election” lie. Its argument: Whatever the evidence with regard to alleged election fraud, Trump supporters have every reason to believe, especially after Russiagate, that “the Regime” and its subservient media are rotten through and through and cannot be trusted. Its author? None other than Darryl Cooper.

The rush to condemn Carlson’s promotion of Cooper by many people to the right of center, from the Babylon Bee’s Seth Dillon to radio host Erick Erickson to Ahmari and others at the Free Press to National Review authors and editors has been laudable. But some of this pushback had overtones of alarm at the fact that trends these same outlets and authors had condoned and even normalized had now crossed a red line. In a Newsweek column, conservative writer Daniella Greenbaum Davis acknowledged as much:

It is on those of us who have, for too long, closed our eyes to the madness among our own ranks, to ensure this chaos of conspiracy does not spread to the mainstream, any more than it already has.

And indeed, for a long time, many of Carlson’s current detractors, not only “closed [their] eyes” to his peddling of conspiracy theories and bigotry but engaged in active apologetics for it. As I noted in The Bulwark more than a year ago after Carlson was booted by Fox News, Weiss wrote a fairly appreciative post about him at the time—acknowledging that she found his views on Ukraine and immigration repugnant, but also stressing “how important he was (and is)” and praising him for challenging COVID lockdowns and telling the truth about Black Lives Matter riots and “the alliance between Big Tech and the government.”

No one is just a little bit Identitarian.

THE RIGHT’S RACIST THROUGHLINE:

Populists Before Trump: John Ganz’s lively new book provides a valuable account of the intellectual origins of Trumpism. (Leon Hadar, 20 Aug 2024, Quillette)

I was therefore surprised to learn that celebrated libertarian economist Murray N. Rothbard was proposing an alliance between classical liberals like me and a bunch of dissident right-wingers known as “paleoconservatives.”

The paleocons contended that America was in peril, that liberalism was the new enemy, and that nationalism was the next big thing. As John Ganz puts it in When the Clock Broke, his new book recalling the paleocons’ intellectual and political odyssey, these thinkers believed that the US should embrace a system that would be “based on domination and exclusion, a restricted sense of community that jealously guarded its boundaries and policed its members, and the direction of a charismatic leader who would use his power to punish and prosecute for the sake of restoring lost national greatness.”

In an attempt to mobilise those he called “radical reactionaries,” Rothbard forged an unlikely alliance between socially conservative nationalists and libertarians disenchanted with open borders and free trade. Speaking before an audience at the John Randolph Club in January 1992, he argued that the task of this new movement was to “finish the job” after the fall of communism and dismantle what he called the “soft Marxism” of the welfare state. “We shall repeal the twentieth century,” he confidently declared, and “nothing less than a counter-revolution” would be required.

This new populist strategy would embrace the power of pessimism, a sharp break with the sunny tenets of classical liberalism and the more familiar conservatism espoused by Ronald Reagan and Bill Buckley’s National Review. Paleoconservatives “looked for inspiration among the ideological ruins of an earlier time,” Ganz writes. They wanted to “break the clock” of progress, returning America to a “previous dispensation while also creating a new country of their own devising.”

They aren’t conservatives.

MAGA IS CONTINENTAL, NOT ANGLOSPHERIC:

Is the Far Right Channeling German Theorist Carl Schmitt’s Divisive Script?: The pro-Nazi political philosopher predicted the crisis of liberal democracy and would have enjoyed watching it struggle (Zack Beauchamp, Aug 13, 2024, The UnPopulist)

A government is “democratic,” Schmitt argues, if it bases its legitimacy on support from the people’s will. But this depends on how you define the “people” and choose to assess their “will.” Every democracy depends on excluding some people, most notably foreigners, from participating in the selection of its leaders; that means, by definition, no democracy rests on universal human equality before the law. Instead, the idea of “equality” in democracy really means equality amongst the people in a political community that shares a certain identity and core agreements.

“There has never been a democracy that did not recognize the concept ‘foreign’ and that could have realized the equality of all men,” he wrote in a 1926 preface to the second edition of Crisis. “Every actual democracy rests on the principle that not only are equals equal but unequals will not be treated equally. Democracy requires, therefore, first homogeneity and second—if the need arises—elimination or eradication of heterogeneity.”

The false notion of universal equality, Schmitt argues, is a liberal concept rather than a democratic one—and “modern mass democracy rests on the confused combination of both.” Politics, for Schmitt, is primarily and essentially about defining who is a “friend” (inside the political community) and who is an “enemy” (outside of it and, thus, a potential target for violence). Democracy is no exception to this general rule, meaning that in practice it will necessarily come into conflict with liberalism—which seeks to supplant conflict and exclusion, the true essences of politics, with impossible attempts at universality. This tension is the source of the “crisis” in his book’s title: though democracy was ideologically triumphant in the interwar period, its ascendancy is forcing its leaders and citizens to grapple with the ways in which actual political life is at odds with its liberal ideals.

People get awfully worked up when conservatives differentiate a republic from a democracy, but you can see here why we valorize the former and abhor the latter. Republican liberty requires equal treatment under law.

IT IS THE “ALL MEN” THAT THE rIGHT FINDS INTOLERABLE:

A Constitutional Republic, If You Can Keep It (Michael Liss, 8/13/24, 3Quarks)

The principles of Jefferson are the definition and axioms of free society…. All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression. —Abraham Lincoln, April 6, 1859 Letter to Henry L. Pierce and others. […]

Just exactly what is the “U.S. Democracy” that may not prevail? Before we go further, we ought to get some nomenclature misunderstandings out of the way. Let’s introduce Democracy’s cousin, the “Constitutional Republic.” Yes, we live in a Constitutional Republic and not a Democracy. No, that’s not a concluding and conclusive argument any time someone wants to make government more representative, more answerable to the voters, or less beholden to privilege. Opponents of change who invoke the phrase “mob rule” just highlight the fact that what’s at stake isn’t high principle, but rather a desire to “supplant[] the principles of free government, and restor[e] those of classification, caste and legitimacy.”

IF THEY WERE THE MAJORITY THEY’D NOT NEED AUTHORITARIANISM:

Why Populism and Authoritarianism Go Hand in Hand: Populism is not anti-elitism, it is raw majoritarianism exercised via a strongman (Shikha Dalmia, Aug 08, 2024, The UnPopulist)

Populism is one of the few concepts that can help us make sense of the “current tectonic shifts in the political landscape and public opinion almost everywhere in the West and beyond,” notes Karen Horn, a classical liberal scholar at Germany’s University of Erfurt. To understand what populism is, it is useful to understand what it is not since the literature on it often lumps many disparate figures and phenomena, some good, some bad, obscuring the core concept. But if we lose clarity on the term, we will risk “defining away a pervasive phenomenon,” Horn notes, undercutting our ability to comprehend the danger it poses.

For starters, populist movements are not popular uprisings like the one Mahatma Gandhi led against British colonial rule in India and Nelson Mandela against white apartheid in South Africa. There are surface similarities, for example both are led by charismatic figures commanding a mass following. But that does not make these uprisings the same as Donald Trump’s MAGA movement or Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindutva (Hindu nationalism).

One big difference is that a popular uprising is a resistance movement against an illicit power that is ruling in explicit violation of the will of those it governs. Populist movements, on the other hand, are aimed at a domestic “establishment” which was formed with the consent of the people but over time has become corrupt—genuinely or allegedly.

Gandhi’s Quit India movement targeted a small—and alien—ruling power denying self-rule (and franchise) to an entire people. Some separatist movements, such as the one in Catalonia in Spain or the Kurds in Turkey and Iraq, are dubbed populist uprisings. Regardless of what one thinks of the justice of their demands, they are, however, more in the vein of anti-colonial struggles like Quit India given that they are directed against an “enemy without.”

Populist movements, by contrast, are a pathology specifically of established democracies where the people already have self-rule. However, the dominant majority feels that this rule no longer works for it because the establishment in control no longer cares for its wishes, or, worse, is actively hostile to it. So these movements are oriented against the “enemy within.” For example, Modi’s populist nationalism is directed against a secular elite that regards the majority Hindu population’s desire for a homogeneously Hindu India as anathema.

This last is a good example of why Populists turn to Authoritarianism: Indians generally do not support such homogeneity.