Identitarianism

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.

SUCH SNOWFLAKES:

WorldTrump spotlight divides S.Africa’s Afrikaners (AFP, April 14, 2025)

Mainly Afrikaner-led governments imposed the race-based apartheid system that denied the black majority political and economic rights until it was voted out in 1994.

Under apartheid, whites benefited from reserved access to jobs, education, land and markets.

The privilege has a legacy. For example, unemployment among white South Africans stands at more than six percent compared to more than 35 percent for the black population.

Prominent journalist and author, Max du Preez, was scathing of complaints of persecution among his fellow Afrikaners.

“Afrikaners are far better off materially and culturally today than in 1994,” he told AFP.

Afrikaans culture is thriving, he said, adding that it is the only local language with four television channels and an array of newspapers, magazines and festivals.

The fear of white persecution “is a phantom pain: it’s not about what is actually happening, but about what could happen”, he said.

“Nothing is coming. The last thing that will happen here is a race war.”

Afrikaner “disillusion” grew as the post-apartheid economy struggled with corruption and governance, said professor Christi van der Westhuizen, author of several books on Afrikaner identity.

This made many susceptible to “divisive” narratives pushed by right-wing groups with roots in apartheid, even if “significant sections of Afrikaners remain vehemently opposed” to these ideas, she said.

Such groups have found a sympathetic audience in the United States, where Trump is close to conservative South African-born billionaire Elon Musk.

THE SECOND COMING OF WILSON:

It’s too late for progressives to be careful what they wish for (George F. Will, 2/12/25, The Washington Post)

Progressives have the presidency they have long desired, but a president they abhor. James Madison warned them: “Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm” (Federalist No. 10).

Theodore Roosevelt’s “stewardship” theory of the presidency was that presidents may do anything they are not explicitly forbidden to do. Woodrow Wilson considered the separation of powers a dangerous anachronism impeding enlightened presidents (e.g., him). He postulated a presidential duty of “interpretation”: discovering what the masses would want if they were sensible, like him. Wilson’s former assistant secretary of the Navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, used radio to enable the presidency to mold opinion. Lyndon B. Johnson, who became an FDR-loyalist in Congress in 1937, commanded a large and obedient congressional majority (1965-1966) as no subsequent president has.

Donald Trump’s rampant (for the moment) presidency is an institutional consequence of progressivism. Progressives, who spent recent years trying to delegitimize the Supreme Court and other federal courts, suddenly understand that courts stand between Trump and the fulfillment of his least lawful whims. Including his disobeying Congress’s unfortunate, but detailed and lawful, ban of TikTok.

THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

Who is Batya Ungar-Sargon?: A Berkeley-educated leftist who couldn’t bear drinking at a bar with Trump voters is now MAGA’s top defender. A tale for our times. (Nate Weisberg, April 9, 2025, Washington Monthly)

Maher opens by asking Ungar-Sargon whether, two months into the administration, she regrets throwing her lot in with Trump.

“Oh, no, I feel the opposite,” she responds. “When I look at what President Trump ran on and the agenda that he’s enacting right now, he took a Republican Party that was built on social conservatism, foreign interventions and wars, and free trade and free markets, and he basically took an ax to all of those.” Her defense builds momentum as she elaborates on Trump’s departures from traditional conservatism. “He’s pretty pro-gay. It’s pretty obvious. He appointed the highest-ranking out gay person, Scott Bessent, our secretary of treasury, which is incredible, and he sidelined the pro-life wing of his party.”

She then adroitly pivots to what she really wants to talk about—economic populism. “Trump looked at our destroyed manufacturing base. He looked at the downwardly mobile working class. He looked at the fact that working-class Americans can no longer afford the American dream.” Her cadence picks up. “There was a handshake agreement between both parties that we should somehow have free trade, which resulted in shipping 5 million good manufacturing jobs overseas to build up China and Mexico. What they did was they brought in millions and millions of illegal migrants to compete with the jobs that remained here … What Donald Trump said was we have to stop selling out the working class. That agenda that he laid out is socially moderate, antiwar, and anti–free trade, protectionist. That,” she concludes, “is a leftist position!”

INFLATION IS THE PURPOSE:

President Trump’s Tariff Formula Makes No Economic Sense. It’s Also Based on an Error.
(Kevin Corinth | Stan Veuger, 4/04/25, AEIdeas)

The formula for the tariffs, originally credited to the Council of Economic Advisers and published by the Office of the United States Trade Representative, does not make economic sense. The trade deficit with a given country is not determined only by tariffs and non-tariff trade barriers, but also by international capital flows, supply chains, comparative advantage, geography, etc.

But even if one were to take the Trump Administration’s tariff formula seriously, it makes an error that inflates the tariffs assumed to be levied by foreign countries four-fold. As a result, the “reciprocal” tariffs imposed by President Trump are highly inflated as well.