Identitarianism

THE rIGHT HAS ALWAYS HATED UNIVERSALISM:

Tocqueville versus the Groypers (Samuel Gregg, 11/17/25, Law & Liberty)

[F]rom the very beginning of his acquaintance with Gobineau, Tocqueville made clear his firm disapproval of the younger man’s opinions. That especially concerned the racial determinism that steadily pervaded Gobineau’s writings. In a letter penned before Gobineau’s Essay appeared, Tocqueville wrote:

I have never concealed from you that I have a strong prejudice against what seems to be your leading idea which strikes me as belonging, I confess, to that family of materialist doctrines and to be one of its most dangerous members, since it involves the fatality of constitution applied not only to the individual but to those collections of individuals that are called races.

Tocqueville didn’t deny that there were often profound cultural differences between, say, Italians, Germans, Russians, Persians, Algerians, and Mexicans. But the notion that peoples have unchanging aptitudes and even fixed destinies by virtue of their ethnicity was described by Tocqueville as “unprovable.” For one thing, he noted, such claims ignored the hard-to-deny fact that historical changes have many causes, and that sorting out which ones are more important than others is always challenging. Monocausal explanations for political and social trends, Tocqueville thought, were invariably wrong.

This empirical criticism, however, was accompanied by Tocqueville querying Gobineau’s motivations for advancing his thesis of racial determinism. Point-blank, he asked Gobineau:

What possible interest can there be in persuading miserable people living in barbarism, idleness, or slavery that, by virtue of their race, there is nothing that can be done to improve their condition, change their mœurs, or modify their government? Don’t you see that from your doctrine derives naturally all the evils which permanent inequality gives birth to: pride, violence, scorn for one’s fellows, tyranny, and abjection in all its forms?

The unspoken answer to Tocqueville’s question was that Gobineau’s propositions had little to do with science or the pursuit of truth. Instead, they had everything to do with a desire to rationalize serious injustices and deny freedom to millions of people. For as Tocqueville wrote elsewhere, Gobineau’s racial determinism led to “a very great restriction, if not to a complete abolition of human liberty.”

Against such positions, Tocqueville affirmed a proposition that he regarded as self-evident: that being the essential “unity of the human race.” For Tocqueville, there were no superhumans or subhumans. There were simply humans. That self-evident truth, Tocqueville believed, was foundational to his brand of liberalism as well as natural law and Christian morality. By contrast, Tocqueville insisted, Gobineau’s suppositions about race led to the conclusion that we live in a world in which “there are only victors and vanquished, masters and slaves by fact of birth.” It was no coincidence, Tocqueville stated, that Gobineau’s “doctrines are approved, cited and commented upon … [by] the owners of negroes in favor of eternal servitude.”

MAGA HAS ALWAYS BEEN WITH US AND ALWAYS HATED AMERICA:

Two Forms of Catholic Nationalism (James M. Patterson, 5/25/23, Law & Liberty)

…Sheen endorsed a form of Americanism, which was by this time in favor with the authorities in Rome. Despite Sheen’s use of Americanist rhetoric (or, arguably, because of it), Pope Pius XI elevated Sheen to Auxiliary Bishop of New York under Cardinal Francis Spellman, while also making Sheen the Director of the American branch of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith. In 1940, he said:

Americanism, as understood by our Founding Fathers, is the political expression of the Catholic doctrine concerning man. Firstly, his rights come from God, and therefore cannot be taken away; secondly, the State exists to preserve them. … The recognition of the inalienable rights of the human person is Americanism, or, to put it another way, an affirmation of the inherent dignity and worth of man. … As a political document, [the Declaration of Independence] affirms what the Gospel affirms as religion: the worth of man. Christ died on a cross for him, and governments are founded on account of him. He is the object of love theologically and politically—the source of rights, inalienable and sacred because when duly protected and safeguarded, he helps in the creation of a kingdom of Caesar which is the steppingstone to the Kingdom of God.

At this time, Sheen condemned nationalism as the elevation of the nation over God, and named Mussolini its chief advocate. He accused Adolph Hitler of valuing race over God, while Stalin made an idol of the proletariat. Sheen made these statements in homilies and public engagements, but most of all over the radio on The Catholic Hour, which broadcast out of New York starting in 1930, sponsored by the National Council of Catholic Men.

In this period, the separationist position was supplied by Coughlin, whose 1931 radio show The Hour of Power, broadcast from Detroit, Michigan. Originally, Coughlin’s mission was to teach listeners the basics of the Catholic faith in a dual effort to catechize Catholics and evangelize non-Catholics. After the Great Depression began, his radio shows began to take on a more political and conspiratorial tone. He became an enthusiastic supporter of Roosevelt, but regularly indulged in antisemitic paranoia that earned him a large audience but little gratitude from the new president. Coughlin took that rejection personally and turned his program against the president and the New Deal. He began to rely on fascist and Nazi propaganda that was introduced into his radio program by agents in Coughlin’s Social Justice Party, and later his Christian Front.

Coughlin argued on the air that Jews wanted Americans to enter the Second World War, hoping the United States would bolster the flagging Jewish conspiracy to create the Soviet Union and spread communism over the world. He therefore urged his listeners to be both anti-war and anti-America.

IF YOU FEEL YOU’VE LOST AT LIFE…:

Why the chemtrail conspiracy theory lingers and grows – and why Tucker Carlson is talking about it (Calum Lister Matheson, 11/14/25, The Conversation)

According to psychologist Rob Brotherton, conspiracy theories have a classic “heads I win, tails you lose” structure. Conspiracy theorists say that chemtrails are part of a nefarious government plot, but its existence has been covered up by the same villains. If there was any evidence that weather modification was actually happening, that would support the theory, but any evidence denying chemtrails also supports the theory – specifically, the part that alleges a cover-up.

People who subscribe to the conspiracy theory consider anyone who confirms it to be a brave whistleblower and anyone who denies it to be foolish, evil or paid off. Therefore, no amount of information could even hypothetically disprove it for true believers. This denial makes the theory nonfalsifiable, meaning it’s impossible to disprove. By contrast, good theories are not false, but they must also be constructed in such a way that if they were false, evidence could show that.

Nonfalsifiable theories are inherently suspect because they exist in a closed loop of self-confirmation. In practice, theories are not usually declared “false” based on a single test but are taken more or less seriously based on the preponderance of good evidence and scientific consensus. This approach is important because conspiracy theories and disinformation often claim to falsify mainstream theories, or at least exploit a poor understanding of what certainty means in scientific methods.

Like most conspiracy theories, the chemtrail story tends not to meet the criteria of parsimony, also known as Occam’s razor, which suggests that the more suppositions a theory requires to be true, the less likely it actually is. While not perfect, this concept can be an important way to think about probability when it comes to conspiracy theories. Is it more likely that the government is covering up a massive weather program, mind-control program or both that involve thousands or millions of silent, complicit agents, from the local weather reporter to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or that we’re seeing ice crystals from plane engines?

…it’s more comforting to believe you’ve been conspired against than to accept personal responsibility.

WHY IT’S ALWAYS MAGA:

‘They’re not wolves – they’re sheep’: the psychiatrist who spent decades meeting and studying lone-actor mass killers: From Port Arthur to Hoddle Street, Paul E Mullen has had a front-row seat to the men behind some of the worst public massacres. He says it’s possible to ‘disrupt the script’ for future violence (Walter Marsh, 8 Nov 2025, The Guardian)

Things changed, Mullen says, after a shooting in Austin, Texas in August 1966, when a 25-year-old male student climbed to the 28th-floor observation deck of a University of Texas building and opened fire, killing 15 and injuring another 30.

“He was in every major newspaper in America, on the front page the next day with his photograph and his name, and he was covered worldwide over the next few days – they later made a film,” he says, referring to 1975’s The Deadly Tower, starring Kurt Russell as the red bandana-clad gunman.

“It was the Texas university tower massacre that created the script, which has now grown and grown and grown,” Mullen reflects. “And the first imitator of the Texas killer was only five weeks [later].”

ike the Port Arthur killer, these are often friendless men fuelled by a mix of resentment and a sense of weakness, drawn to the promise of infamy, publicity, and a noteworthy death enjoyed by previous mass killers. Some even dress like their predecessors, from Russell’s red bandana to the all-black attire of the teenage Columbine school shooters.

“They gather grievances, grievances, grievances,” Mullen says, echoing the common complaints he has heard across his career. “‘People mistreated me’; ‘I was cheated’; ‘they’re not fair’; ‘no one likes me’. All these things, but they also feel that they should have fought back.

“The resentment builds up and builds up, and it becomes your whole attitude to the world, which is angry, which is full of a sense of grievance. But it’s much worse, because you never did anything. And this, in a sense, is your final reply.”

And Populism and Identitarianism are nothing but te politics of resentment.

MAGA IS UNAMERICAN:

The Founders Would Abhor Trump’s Domestic Deployments: And the notion that courts can’t review his National Guard decisions is baseless. (Philip Allen Lacovara, Nov 07, 2025, The Bulwark)

The Founders would be appalled. They fought a revolution against a king who sent his troops against them to enforce his laws. That experience was fresh in their minds when they adopted a Constitution that says that Congress alone has the power “to provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.”

The president argues that it is appropriate for him to use the military “to execute the laws.” He also contends that the courts have no authority even to consider the legitimacy of his decision to summon National Guard troops and send them into American cities for what he deems law enforcement.

Neither position has constitutional support.

WHY ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR MY FAILURE WHEN I CAN BLAME A “THEM”?:

The New Medievals: The bones of our conspiracies haven’t changed, though their details are different. (Claire Lehmann, 10/27/25, The Dispatch))

We crave narratives that make the world legible, particularly in times of instability or flux. In psychological experiments conducted by Adam Galinsky and Jennifer Whitson in 2008, it was found that people who were made to feel powerless began to see patterns that were not there. Participants were asked to recall a moment in their lives when they felt powerless; afterward, they were shown random visual “static” images or sequences of stock data and asked to identify patterns. Those who had been primed to feel powerless were far more likely to report seeing shapes, trends, or connections that didn’t exist. “Participants who lacked control were more likely to perceive a variety of illusory patterns, including seeing images in noise, forming illusory correlations in stock market information, perceiving conspiracies, and developing superstitions,” the authors wrote. Another 2020 study found that a sense of a lack of agency also predicted belief in Jewish conspiracy.

The conspiracist’s worldview transforms chaos into drama and tragedy into design. It restores meaning to a confusing world by insisting that every disaster, every death, every downturn must have a reason.

NOT NAZIS!…JUST FOLLOWERS OF NAZISM…:

How a German Thinker Explains MAGA Morality (David French, Jan. 26, 2025, NY Times)

No one was more aware than the founders that the American experiment contradicts our base natures. A century before Schmitt was born, they understood that reality intimately.

Our government is constructed with the understanding that, as James Madison famously put it in Federalist No. 51, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”

The Constitution tries to ameliorate the will to power as best it can — as Madison said in the same essay, “ambition must be made to counteract ambition” — but the founders also knew that even our elaborate system of checks and balances is insufficient. To make our system work, virtue is a necessity.

“We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion,” John Adams wrote in his 1798 Letter to the Massachusetts Militia, “Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net.”

Adams’s New England metaphor is perfect (his readers would absolutely know what a whale would do to a net): Pluralism requires both law and ethics to function, and without ethics the law will fail.

We forget how much the founders — for all their faults — were focused not just on the forms of American government, but also on personal virtue. One of my favorite books from last year was “The Pursuit of Happiness” by Jeffrey Rosen, the president of the National Constitution Center.

The book describes how the founders envisioned the pursuit of happiness not as the pursuit of pleasure or wealth, but rather as “the pursuit of virtue — as being good, rather than feeling good.” Benjamin Franklin, for example, listed temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquillity, chastity and humility as indispensable elements of virtue.

You can immediately see the contrast with Schmitt’s friend-enemy politics. Virtue ethics certainly recognizes the existence of enemies, but it still imposes moral obligations on our treatment of our foes. The virtues Franklin listed are not simply the way you love your own political tribe; they are universal moral obligations that apply to our treatment of everyone.

Demonstrate these virtues, and your enemies can live with dignity and freedom even when they lose a political battle. When your enemies show the same virtues, you can still enjoy a good life even when you lose. That’s the social compact of pluralism. In a decent society, no defeat is ultimate defeat, and no victory is ultimate victory. And in all circumstances, your fundamental human rights must be preserved.

Dive too deeply into the friend-enemy distinction, by contrast, and it can become immoral to treat your enemies with kindness if kindness weakens the community in its struggle against a mortal foe. In the world of the friend-enemy distinction, your ultimate virtue is found in your willingness to fight. Your ultimate vice is betraying your side by refusing the call to political war.

The friend-enemy distinction explains why so many Republicans are particularly furious at anti-Trump dissenters — especially when those dissenters hold conservative values. In the friend-enemy distinction, ideology is secondary to loyalty.