Identitarianism

WHY MAGA HATES AMERICA:

Rediscovering Order in an Age of Populism (Mike Pence & Ed Feulner, Summer 2025, National Affairs)

Conservatism once proudly embraced a positive vision, offering the American people clear alternatives to the prevailing left-leaning orthodoxies of the day. In the final decades of the 20th century, conservatives not only opposed affirmative action’s quixotic pursuit of equal outcomes, they championed equality of opportunity for all. Conservatives were not simply opposed to letting communism run wild; they contained it by boldly leading the free world. Conservatives were not just critical of big government; their support for free markets unleashed one of the greatest economic expansions in history. At the heart of conservatism lay an ambition to help America flourish, coupled with the desire to preserve the private institutions — families, churches, local communities, and the like — that serve as the building blocks of an ordered society. […]

Conservatism is not a rigid ideology promising utopia; it is a disposition — a state of mind grounded in timeless principles. It recognizes human nature as it is and has been throughout the ages, and points toward a distinct approach to governing ourselves. Conservatism values obedience to a transcendent moral order, reverence for tradition and our forebears, prudence in decision-making, humility regarding our place in history, and the pursuit of justice in a fallen world. These harmonious values make conservatism a timeless philosophy that aligns seamlessly with self-governance.

In seeking to privilege white males, the Right needs bigger government, has to repudiate morality for its universalism and, thereby, must oppose the Founding.

WHY MAGA IMAGINES DONALD MUSCULAR:

The Dark Magic of Words: Why Fascism and Illiberalism is So Seductive to Writers: Ed Simon Looks at Eduard Limonov, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Yukio Mishima, and Others (Ed Simon, June 23, 2025, LitHub)

Myth and fantasy are what the fascist trade in, of Russia made great again, or Italy made great again, or someplace made great again (it’s always some place), but at the expense of our souls. This is the danger of an artistic temperament at its most extreme, what Nietzsche celebrated as the “Dionysian” in The Birth of Tragedy, where the artist “enriches everything out of one’s own fullness: whatever one sees, whatever wills is seen swelled, taught, strong, overloaded with strength” until all of reality merely becomes “reflections of his perfection.”

Such idealization of pure experience is an idolatry of death, since such an artist can’t envision the world beyond their individuality, can’t conceive of others enduring after the poet’s extinction. Think of Limonov’s “Yes, Death!,” of D’Annunzio’s 1894 novel The Triumph of Death.

CUOMO RAN AS DONALD:

Zohran Mamdani and the Making of a “Muslim Menace”: Islamophobia and the politics of belonging (Tazeen M. Ali, June 24, 2025, ARC)

In a campaign mailer designed by a PAC supporting disgraced former New York governor and current mayoral hopeful Andrew Cuomo, Queens assembly member Zohran Mamdani’s image appears with his beard digitally altered to look longer, fuller, and darker. This manipulation invokes tired Islamophobic tropes that cast bearded brown Muslim men as dangerous, violent, and in Mamdani’s case, unfit for public office. While the mailer was never distributed by Cuomo’s camp, the image leaked online. Mamdani responded to the image by calling it what it was: Islamophobic and “meant to make me look threatening.”

Moreover, the manipulated beard image is a part of a long-standing tradition in American politics: altering minoritized candidates’ physical features to further racist, Islamophobic, and antisemitic tropes, and cast them as inherently other. Cuomo’s camp condemned the altered image, but this smear was not an isolated incident: it was part of a broader pattern. As Mamdani’s campaign has surged in the final days before New York’s Democratic mayoral primary—which ends Tuesday—he has faced a wave of coded and overt attacks. Cuomo has warned voters that to elect Mamdani would be “reckless and dangerous.” Mamdani has also received multiple death threats replete with Islamophobic language, calling him “a terrorist who is not welcome in New York or America.”

These attacks are not just about politics. They are also about identity. Mamdani, a Twelver Shia Muslim, African-born immigrant, and democratic socialist, represents a challenge to entrenched racial, religious, and political hierarchies. As with other progressive politicians of color, from Ilhan Omar to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the backlash against him reveals the limits of establishment tolerance for candidates who refuse to conform.

WHERE’S CATO WHEN WE NEED HIM:

Caesar in California: A domestic deployment in California could mark the moment the military ceases to serve the Constitution—and begins serving the man. (Jonathan M. Winer, Jun 9, 2025, Washington Spectator)

Most significantly, the President would be using the Insurrection Act not to restore order in a collapsed state, but to override political resistance in a functioning, law-abiding one.

This is not Little Rock, where federal troops escorted children into school after Governor Orval Faubus defied the Supreme Court. It is California—a sovereign state whose disagreements with federal immigration policy have been debated in courts, not on battlefields. The precedent is telling. Then, as now, a state deployed its National Guard in defiance of federal authority—Faubus to block school desegregation ordered by the Supreme Court, Trump now to impose federal immigration enforcement over local resistance. But the roles have been reversed: President Eisenhower used the Insurrection Act to uphold constitutional rights and enforce the judicial mandate to desegregate Arkansas public schools. Trump now flirts with using it to suppress political dissent and override judicially recognized state discretion. In both cases, the stakes concern more than law enforcement—they test whether the military serves the Constitution or the will of a single executive.

The Insurrection Act grants the President broad power—but that power depends on facts that justify its use. When those facts are weak, manipulated, or manufactured, the result is not emergency governance but authoritarian performance.

The administration may counter that ICE officers are unable to execute lawful warrants in cities where resistance is both physical and coordinated. They may argue that when protesters form human chains to block detentions, and local police stand down, the rule of law is undermined. These facts would need to be documented in detail—especially if challenged in a motion for emergency injunctive relief.

That challenge would come quickly. Within hours of a formal invocation, expect California to file for a temporary restraining order in federal district court. The complaint would argue that the President’s action is ultra vires, lacks factual basis, and violates constitutional principles of federalism, due process, and freedom of speech and association. Declarations from ICE personnel, federal marshals, and state officials would be critical in assessing whether the claimed “impracticability” is real or rhetorical.

Whatever a district court decides, the outcome would likely be appealed and quickly reach the Supreme Court. The stakes are enormous. The Insurrection Act grants the President broad power—but that power depends on facts that justify its use. When those facts are weak, manipulated, or manufactured, the result is not emergency governance but authoritarian performance.

We’re all so fond of declaiming, “Never Again!” And then we get spooked by “others” who mean it.

ALL DONALD HAS TO OFFER IS IDENTITARIANISM:

Against Identity by Alexander Douglas review – a superb critique of contemporary self-obsession: A philosopher challenges us to forget about ourselves in this powerfully strange counterblast to identity fetishism (Steven Poole, 10 Jun 2025, The Guardian)

Philosopher Alexander Douglas’s deeply interesting book diagnoses our malaise, ecumenically, as a universal enslavement to identity. An alt-right rabble rouser who denounces identity politics is just as wedded to his identity as a leftwing “activist” is wedded to theirs. And this, Douglas argues persuasively, explains the polarised viciousness of much present argument. People respond to criticisms of their views as though their very identity is being attacked. The response is visceral and emotional. That’s why factchecking conspiracy theories doesn’t work. And it’s not just a social media problem; it’s far worse than that. “If you define yourself by your ethnicity or your taste in music,” Douglas argues, “then you ipso facto demarcate yourself against others who do not share in that identity. Here we have the basis for division and intergroup conflict.”

The Right is the Left.

CAPRICE CLASSIC:

How Ancient Rome Blew Up Its Own Business Empire (Bret Devereaux, May. 2nd, 2025, Foreign Policy)

Roman aristocrats, like all ancient elites, almost universally disliked trade and held the merchants who made it possible in contempt. Trade was seen as a sordid, cheating sort of thing (the theory of comparative advantage that explained how a merchant produced value honestly would not be developed until 1776) whereby merchants could gain wealth outside of the proper ways of being born rich or capturing wealth in war. Worse yet, trade generated wealth outside of the direct control of the landholding elites who dominated politics in nearly every ancient society.

Yet the Roman Empire benefited greatly from expanding Mediterranean trade between the third century B.C.E. to the third century C.E. Roman policy encouraged trade and the economic growth it created lined Roman coffers too, at least until the Romans themselves fragmented the pan-Mediterranean trade zone they had created, impoverishing their empire and leaving it less able to face the challenges that would eventually lead to its fragmentation and dissolution in the West. […]

Beginning in 235, the Romans entered a period known as the Crisis of the Third Century: Five decades of renewed civil war shattered the unity of the empire and thus the unity and safety of its markets. Rival emperors, locked in brutal military competition, debased the currency to pay their soldiers and buy loyalty, leading the once reliable Roman currency system to become shaky at best.

Worse yet, when the crisis came to an end, the policies the newly triumphant emperors Diocletian and later Constantine pursued hardly favored economic freedom or the renewal of markets. When Diocletian’s fumbling efforts to stabilize the Roman currency system produced runaway inflation, he responded with the traditional expedient of attempting to fix prices, issuing an edict on maximum prices, the text of which is partially preserved today.

Like most such state interventions in the economy, the edict failed to stabilize prices. Meanwhile, Diocletian also revised the tax system, creating a bureaucratic, centralized, and cumbersome taxes that relied on a five-year census that was never regularly performed, leading to tax assessments that bore little resemblance to the economic activity they were taxing. In an effort to stabilize this system, Constantine, rather than creating a more agile tax system, created a less agile economy, forbidding tenant farmers to leave their lands in a forerunner of what would become European serfdom.

The result was that while the Roman economy stabilized, it did so as a less productive economy, more exposed to the decisions and caprice of emperors and one that provided, as a result, fewer resources for the Romans to defend their empire.

Trumpism has never worked.

WHAT DONALD MEANS BY “GREAT AGAIN”:

How Baseball Shaped Black Communities in Reconstruction-Era America: Gerald Early on the Early History of Black Participation in America’s Pastime (Gerald Early, May 1, 2025, LitHub)

But if the elevation of Black Americans during Reconstruction was a revolution, it was met by a fierce counterrevolution on the part of white Southerners who vehemently and violently opposed any change in the status of Black people. White Southerners utterly opposed the Freedmen’s Bureau, a federal agency established to help newly freed African Americans obtain fairer wages and better employment conditions from their former enslavers; the bureau also established, in conjunction with the American Missionary Association, some HBCUs (historically Black colleges and universities). But its main work ended in 1869, and the bureau closed for good in 1872, at which time it had not had nearly enough time to achieve the goal of helping a mostly impoverished people become self-supporting citizens.

Black citizens were climbing a steep hill, but they were willing to do so, in part because so many of them believed in this country, even if the country did not believe in them.
White Southerners formed terrorist organizations, like the Ku Klux Klan, that brutally intimidated Black citizens and created Black Codes to nullify African Americans’ new rights. Barely a year after the end of the Civil War, in May 1866, Memphis erupted in one of the worst racial pogroms of the Reconstruction period. White people, provoked because Black soldiers had stood up to racist white (mostly Irish) policemen, rampaged through the Black community of Memphis, killing 46 Black people, injuring over 75, and burning to the ground every Black school and church in the city. The Colfax Massacre in Louisiana in 1873 resulted in the murder of somewhere between 62 and 153 Black citizens who had surrendered after resisting a white attempt to take over the local courthouse.

Despite Frederick Douglass’s efforts as the last president of the Freedman’s Savings Bank, including lending it $10,000 to keep it afloat, the bank’s failure in 1874 destroyed the faith of millions of Black people in the country’s financial institutions. The lack of will on the part of the federal government and “the friends of the Negro” to enforce the social and economic changes that Reconstruction had promised left Black Americans feeling betrayed, powerless, and further impoverished by the 1880s. With the failure of Reconstruction, Black people were no longer fully empowered citizens but political and social ciphers. As Malcolm X once told a Harlem audience, “You’re nothing but an ex-slave.” The Confederates may have lost the Civil War, but the southern counter revolutionists won the race war that followed.

We did not Reconstruct hard enough.

WHEN YOU “JUST TRUST THE SCIENCE”…

Blood-and-Soil Neoliberalism: An interview with Quinn Slobodian, the author of Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right (Nick Serpe, April 29, 2025, Dissent)

Serpe: You call this the “new fusionism.” What’s the substance of this project? Does it supplant the old fusionism of the right, or is it building on top of it?

Slobodian: There’s a very famous way of describing the conservative movement in the United States as one of fusionism between people primarily interested in economic freedom and market liberalism, on the one hand, and people primarily interested in Christian values and traditional order on the other. Historians have described an alliance between these two wings of the American right starting in the 1950s, which we can later see achieving power in certain ways in the Reagan administration and the second Bush administration.

The new fusionism I describe in the book starts to come together in the 1990s. The people who were arguing about the danger of the state and persistent socialism, and the need to defend capitalism and economic freedom, started to appeal, rather than to categories from religion, to categories from science—in particular evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, and even race science. This was a domain of great excitement and intellectual ferment in the 1990s, especially as books like The Bell Curve mainstreamed ideas of racial differences and intelligence, and scientific breakthroughs like the human genome project made it seem like our bodies contained a particular kind of truth that could not be denied by all the humanities professors in the world. Appeals to science became an effective way to fight this fight within the realm of ideas—in the academy, in the pages of magazines, and on talk shows. They somehow had more solidity than the longstanding appeal to Christian doctrine.

They’re garden variety Darwinists.

THE HOOD ALWAYS SHOWS:

Marine Le Pen’s favourite far-Right philosopher Dominique Venner preached the virtues of de-demonisation (Theo Zenou, July 6, 2024, UnHerd)

In the silence of his prison cell, as Dély explains in his book, Venner came to a realisation that would change the course of French politics. In hindsight, it seems obvious. But, at the time, it represented a paradigm shift. The far-Right would never be the same again.

His realisation was that the far-Right would never gain power through insurrection. Instead, if it hoped to govern someday, it had to win at the ballot box. In modern democracies, violence wasn’t only inefficient — coups, as Venner knew first-hand, could easily fail — but it also turned ordinary people off. The OAS hadn’t managed to keep Algeria in French hands or even boost the cause of French Algeria. “Indiscriminate terrorism is the best way to cut yourself off from a population,” Venner wrote. “It’s a desperate act.”

The far-Right, Venner now believed, had to forsake violence if it was serious about one day implementing its violent project. Drawing on Lenin, he argued that revolution was “less about seizing power than about using it to build a new society”. To do that, the movement needed to develop a coherent ideology and create an organisation to spread that ideology in society.

But — and this is the most important part — the far-Right couldn’t be transparent about its ideology. The reason: ordinary people were brainwashed. “Through permanent one-way propaganda, to which everyone is subjected from childhood,” Venner wrote, “the regime, in its many forms, intoxicates the French people.” The far-Right had to outwit the regime. “A revolutionary struggle, a fight to the death against an all-powerful, wily, experienced adversary, must be fought with ideas and cunning rather than force.”

As such, it was necessary for the far-Right to hide its true nature. People weren’t ready for it. Instead, without abandoning its core tenets, it should adapt its appearance. In Dély’s pithy phrase, the far-Right should “know how to change its attire to better reassure and seduce”.

“It was necessary for the far-Right to hide its true nature. People weren’t ready for it.”
Venner had been mulling this strategy for a while. Back in 1959, when he had founded the Nationalist Party, a violent group which would soon be dissolved, Venner had told new recruits that they should be careful about what they said in public. “Never discuss subjects that may shock newcomers by the way you present them,” he had warned them. “For example, the métèque problem must never in a presentation or a conversation be approached with the perspectives of the crematorium or the soap dish.” In other words, never say that you ultimately want to exterminate all métèques. When you are a fascist, you can kiss but you can never tell.

Shortly after leaving jail in 1962, Venner published his pamphlet. Titled Pour une critique positive (Towards a Positive Criticism), it became a self-help manual for generations of French far-Right activists, for whom Venner is the closest thing they have to an Antonio Gramsci. With his bold, iconoclastic text, he laid the ideological groundwork for the National Rally to become the most popular party in France. And he pioneered the strategy of dédiabolisation that has been at the heart of Marine Le Pen’s political career.

For years now, commentators have marvelled at how Le Pen detoxified the party she inherited from her father, Jean-Marie, a convicted Holocaust denier. In 2015, she even expelled him from the party for making antisemitic comments. Since then, Le Pen has worked hard to soften her rhetoric. For instance, she doesn’t use the loaded term “Great Replacement” anymore; instead, she talks about “mass immigration”. And unlike her erstwhile rival Eric Zemmour, she doesn’t limit herself to talking about the threat of “Islamic extremism”. She has spent considerable time talking about economic issues.

Le Pen has also nurtured a new generation of far-Right leaders who don’t raise their voices or go off-script. With their tailored suits, they look like respectable politicians.

And then you accuse Haitians of eating house pets…

IT STARTED OUT THAT WAY:

How Anti-Woke Went Intellectually Bankrupt Look who’s elite now. (Ross Barkan, Apr. 19, 2025, UnHerd)

For those who made a great deal of money and attracted large followings over the last half-decade or so railing against all things woke, this is an uncertain moment. Unless they want to lie to themselves, they can’t pretend it’s still 2020 and millions are marching in the memory of George Floyd.

What do those aforementioned two paths look like in practice? They are probably best represented by two prominent activists, Christopher Rufo and Richard Hanania. Rufo rose to fame as the leader of the movement against critical-race theory, and he has found great influence in the second Trump administration. A longtime conservative, Rufo is now proudly MAGA. Trump’s attacks on higher education are ripped straight from Rufo’s playbook. If he still pretends woke is more dominant than it actually is — to a hammer, everything is a nail — he is at least openly supportive of Trump and understands that what he reaps is what he sows: an administration willing to violate free speech and due process in the name of combating socially progressive causes.

Hanania is, like Rufo, a warrior of anti-woke. Even more extreme, in some ways, he once posted pseudonymously on several white-supremacist and misogynistic websites. If he disavowed that era of his ideological development, he still could be called, based on his public writings, a racist and misogynist. Hanania’s story has a new twist: He is now, unlike Rufo, explicitly anti-Trump. “I think there’s a level of corruption here, a level of blatant sort of corruption to the way government is working that is unprecedented, at least in our recent history,” Hanania recently told Vox. Admitting, on “pure policy,” there was much he liked when he it came to Trump’s war on DEI, “if you’re looking at where the movement is going, [when it comes to] how political movements and how people in power should behave and act in their relationship to truth and the relationship to the rest of society, I think it’s gotten pretty bad.”

Is anti-MAGA a new grift for Hanania? Or is he earnest? It doesn’t matter much; he, like Rufo, has made his public pronouncements, and he is taking the action he sees fit. The more intellectually confused position may be best represented today by Bari Weiss’s Free Press, which can neither strongly denounce Trump like Hanania nor, like Rufo, transition to being a full-throated arm of the conservative movement, like almost all right-wing media. Before Trump was inaugurated again, the Free Press had an obvious niche: There were a good number of centrists and left-leaning liberals who had grown disenchanted with the progressivism of the late 2010s and early 2020s. In retrospect, it was absurd that an opinion piece published in the Times by a sitting senator could trigger the effective firing of a top editor and mass revolts among staff. The performative aspects of woke were exhausting, and they did chill free speech.

But now it’s the federal government plainly attacking speech and behaving lawlessly.

The anti-Woke schtick was never anything more than a denial that racism, generally, still existed and that systemic racism, in particular, no longer had any effect, if it ever had. The character of those preaching this always exposes their own racism. And it is neverr limited to blacks.