Identitarianism

THE UNWASHED ELITES:

Never Reelect a Revolutionary: Post-populism in messianic time (Benjamin R. Teitelbaum, 11/08/24, The Point)

[B]eing entrenched is a problem for populism. Populism declares that there is a totalizing antagonism between the people and the establishment. Its raison d’être stems from the claim that elites leading the media, the government and educational and scientific institutions operate in opposition to the interests of the populations they are meant to serve. Some populists cast the difference between the two camps in terms of identity, claiming that “elites” and the “people” are fundamentally different human types. Racism can grow in this environment, but even it can be a secondary tool, a means of stylizing a deeper drive in the populist imaginary: namely, the claim that the oppositions between elites and the people are irreconcilable. For that reason, gradual reform, compromise and moderation will not do. Populism lurches toward revolution and the complete explosion of the establishment.

That’s why political success menaces the populist. How can populists justify managing the very elite institutions they were meant to destroy?

Populists may respond to this riddle by painting their enemies in the establishment as residing outside of their reach, such as when Hungarian president Viktor Orbán claims to be fighting against the European Union and Western liberalism. Some, like the Sweden Democrats, may be lucky enough to be kingmakers for a governing administration without being formally a part of it, allowing them to shape policy while posing as outsiders. Enfranchised populists may claim that the forces they fight against are so embedded in institutions that elected politicians can’t (yet) reach them, and thus that the cause of rebellion must continue even after an electoral victory. Narratives about a deep state running the U.S. government during the first presidency of Donald Trump are an example of the latter.

These are attempts at mitigation rather than cures, however. If, for example, a deep state allegedly remains in control even after a revolutionary takeover, populism’s supporters may deem political action futile and disengage. Elected populists are thus forced into a world of gamesmanship, negotiation, compromise and management. They often become conservers, conservative even—not in the palingenetic sense of resurrecting a lost golden age but merely, and more boringly, through their incentive to maintain the world in which they flourish. Max Weber famously argued that bureaucrats will seldom cross the institutions they run, because with time their personal power and prestige depend on those very institutions.

Such is the condition for many populists throughout the world today, in what we might call an era of post-populism—an era during which yesterday’s revolutionaries now cling to the status quo, where radical “Make America Great Again” gives way to paranoid “Keep America Great.” Elected populists (and particularly reelected populists) now find themselves tasked with instilling a durable mythology that will allow supporters to maintain their commitment to the cause even as it changes.

IT’S JUST ABOUT HATE:

Inside the Ruthless, Restless Final Days of Trump’s Campaign (Tim Alberta, November 2, 2024, The Atlantic)

At the end of June, in the afterglow of a debate performance that would ultimately prompt President Joe Biden to end his campaign for reelection, Donald Trump startled his aides by announcing that he’d come up with a new nickname for his opponent.

“The guy’s a retard. He’s retarded. I think that’s what I’ll start calling him,” Trump declared aboard his campaign plane, en route to a rally that evening, according to three people who heard him make the remarks: “Retarded Joe Biden.”

The staffers present—and, within hours, others who’d heard about the epithet secondhand—pleaded with Trump not to say this publicly. They warned him that it would antagonize the moderate voters who’d been breaking in their direction, while engendering sympathy for a politician who, at that moment, was the subject of widespread ridicule. As Trump demurred, musing that he might debut the nickname at that night’s event, his staffers puzzled over the timing. Biden was on the ropes. Polls showed Trump jumping out to the biggest lead he’d enjoyed in any of his three campaigns for the presidency. Everything was going right for the Republican Party and its nominee. Why would he jeopardize that for the sake of slinging a juvenile insult? (A campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, said the nickname “was never discussed and this is materially false.”)

Over the next several days—as Trump’s aides held their breath, convinced he would debut this latest slur at any moment—they came to realize something about Trump: He was restless, unhappy, and, yes, tired of winning. For the previous 20 months, he’d been hemmed in by a campaign built on the principles of restraint and competence. The former president’s ugliest impulses were regularly curbed by his top advisers; his most obnoxious allies and most outlandish ideas were sidelined. These guardrails had produced a professional campaign—a campaign that was headed for victory. But now, like a predator toying with its wounded catch, Trump had become bored. It reminded some allies of his havoc-making decisions in the White House. Trump never had much use for calm and quiet. He didn’t appreciate normalcy. Above all, he couldn’t stand being babysat. […]

In conversations with nearly a dozen of the former president’s aides, advisers, and friends, it became apparent that Trump’s feeling of midsummer tedium marked a crucial moment in his political career, setting off a chain reaction that nearly destroyed his campaign and continues to threaten his chances of victory. Even as they battled Democrats in a race that refuses to move outside the margin of error, some of Trump’s closest allies spent the closing months of the campaign at war with one another: planting damaging stories, rallying to the defense of wronged colleagues, and preemptively pointing fingers in the event of an electoral defeat.

At the center of this tumult, people close to Trump agreed, is a candidate whose appetite for chaos has only grown—and serves as a reminder of what awaits should he win on November 5.

“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.”

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.

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.