Identitarianism

WHY THE lEFT/rIGHT HATES THE fOUNDING:

Beyond Schmitt (John Ehrett, 5/20/24, Ad Fontes)

Unlike Vermeule, these Protestant thinkers are not drawn to Schmitt because of his fascination with executive administration. Instead, many Protestant commentators on Schmitt take up a theme far more basic to his thought: his claim that the essence of the “political” is the distinction between “friend” and “enemy.”

There is, of course, a sense in which this definition is trivially true. If there were no disagreements between people, there would be no “politics” in any familiar sense of the term. But it is the sheer bleakness of Schmitt’s characterization of the “enemy” that distinguishes his paradigm. In his best-known work, The Concept of the Political, Schmitt argues that the distinction is not just descriptive of, but constitutive of, politics as such.[6] That is to say, in the strictest sense politics is not merely about the organized human pursuit of some common good or other. It requires, at its root, an other destined for destruction.

Schmitt makes the matter quite clear: the “enemy” is one whom one seeks to annihilate. Concepts of “friend” and “enemy,” on Schmitt’s model, “receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing. War follows from enmity. “War is the existential negation of the enemy.”[7] An irreducibly violent agonism, which must inform how leaders and citizens alike relate to external “others,” lies at the very heart of politics as such.

If Schmitt is right, then anyone engaged in the business of politics must ask a fateful question: Who, then, is my enemy?

The very question—an inversion of the parable of the Good Samaritan—rings odd to Christian ears. What about Jesus’s command to love your enemies? It seems strange to identify individuals (functionally) excluded from the horizon of Christian concern.

Identitarianism is anti-Christian.

IT’S ALWAYS THE TRUMPISTS:

A gunman shot Slovakia’s prime minister. Here’s what you need to know. (MICHAL ONDERCO, MAY 15, 2024, Good Authority)

We do not know much about the motivation of the alleged shooter, who was apprehended quickly. While his immediate comments at the police station hinted at his political opposition to some of Fico’s recent domestic policy moves, journalists quickly dug up earlier racist anti-Roma texts, and his earlier affinity with Slovak Levies, a paramilitary group with ties to Russia.

REACTIONARIES HAVE TO KEEP REACTING:

Is Bari Weiss Embarrassed by the Intellectual Dark Web? (Matt Johnson, May. 4th, 2024, Daily Beast)

However, in the 2018 Times essay, Weiss conceded that audience capture—a phenomenon where public figures are rewarded for producing content that flatters the biases and prejudices of their audiences—“probably helps explain why some people in this group talk constantly about the regressive left but far less about the threat from the right.” Weiss warned of the dangers of aligning with right-wing charlatans who happen to have large platforms. She worried that “cranks, grifters and bigots” might take over the movement.

These concerns turned out to be well-founded.

The IDW name, nowadays, is more of a punchline than a movement—not even used by superfans of its erstwhile members. This is in no small part because many of its core members have devolved into a cadre of virulent MAGA activists, anti-vaxxers, and unhinged conspiracy mongers of all kinds.

The Right exists to amuse normals.

“I JUST KNOW THERE WAS A LAB LEAK!”

STUDY: MID-LIFE CONSPIRACY THEORISTS ARE INDEED LONELY WEIRDOS (NOOR AL-SIBAI, 5/01/24, Futurism)

It’s a commonly-held assumption that most people who believe in conspiracy theories are loners — and new research backs it up. […]

With a 2022 meta-analysis strongly associating social alienation with conspiratorial beliefs, the Oslo researchers decided to look into nearly three decades of records on more than 2200 Norwegians, using healthcare and psychological data to determine what factors might help explain mid-life conspiracism. What they found, as they explain in their paper, was fascinating:

Conspiracist worldviews were particularly appealing to participants who were relatively lonely as adolescents and experienced increasing loneliness through their lives. One possible explanation for this pattern, albeit tentative and requiring further research, is that the contrasting of one’s own increasing loneliness relative to peers might be potent in fostering feelings of social isolation motivating our participants to turn to conspiracy theorizing to protect their ego, or to seek social connection among like-minded conspiracist groups.