Identitarianism

IT IS THE UNIVERSALISM THAT maga HATES:

How 2 Presidents Saved the Declaration of Independence (Janice Rogers Brown, 10.10/25, Coolidge Review)

Lincoln passionately defended the Declaration’s principle of equality during his Senate campaign against Stephen Douglas in 1858. Douglas argued that the signers of the Declaration referred only “to white men, to men of European birth and European descent, when they declared the equality of all men.”

Lincoln rejected this claim. During a July 10 speech in Chicago, he said: “Let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man—this race and that race and the other race being inferior…. Let us discard all these things, and unite as one people throughout this land, until we shall once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal.” Lincoln called the Declaration’s insistence on the equality of all men “the father of all moral principle.”

The next year, in a letter reflecting on the anniversary of Thomas Jefferson’s birth, Lincoln wrote:

All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.

Lincoln showed his commitment to this abstract truth in the Gettysburg Address. America, he said, was “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” The Civil War, he said, was a test not just for America but for “any nation so conceived and so dedicated.”

The political philosopher Harry Jaffa notes that Lincoln’s interpretation of “all men are created equal” transformed that proposition from a “pre-political, negative, minimal” norm that “prescribes what civil society ought not to be” into “a transcendental affirmation of what it ought to be.” […]

In his 1926 speech at Independence Hall, Coolidge acknowledged that the right of people to choose their own rulers was an old idea—detailed by the Dutch as early as July 26, 1581, and by the British people in their long struggle with the Stuarts. But he insisted that “we should search those charters in vain for an assertion of the doctrine of equality.” It was this equality principle that Coolidge deemed “profoundly revolutionary.”

The Declaration mattered, Coolidge said, not because it established a new nation but because it established “a nation on new principles.” The Declaration’s preamble set out “three very definite propositions” regarding “the nature of mankind and therefore of government”: “the doctrine that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that therefore the source of the just powers of government must be derived from the consent of the governed.”

GOTTA BLAME SOMEONE FOR PERSONAL FAILURE:

Hannah Arendt can help us understand today’s far-right populism (Christopher J. Finlay, December 28, 2025, Asia Times)

Comparing today’s politics to fully fledged totalitarianism can be illuminating. But if it’s all we do, we risk overlooking Arendt’s subtler lessons about warning signs that can help us gauge threats to democracy.

The first is that political catastrophe isn’t always signposted by great causes, but arises when sometimes seemingly trivial developments converge. The greatest example for Arendt was political antisemitism. During the 19th century, only a “crackpot” fringe embraced it. By the 1930s, it was driving world politics.

This resonates with hard-right and far-right ideology today. Ideas widely seen as eccentric 20 years ago have increasingly come to shape democratic politics. Anti-immigrant sentiment and xenophobia penetrate the political mainstream. Alongside growing Islamophobia, antisemitism is on the rise again too.

The mainstreaming of previously marginal views helps explain a second warning sign that politics is increasingly driven by what Arendt described as “forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest.”

A simplistic politics of ideological fantasy and paranoia takes over instead. It appeals most to the isolated and lonely, people lost in society who have given up hope that anyone will ever address their real interests and concerns. Perpetually frustrated by reality, they seek escape in conspiracy theories instead.

IDENTITARIANISM IS AN A-FRAME:

What Jill Lepore Knows About Harvard (Eboo Patel, Dec 05, 2025, Persuasion)

Lepore, a renowned historian, Harvard professor, and New Yorker staff writer, made this statement to David Leonhardt of The New York Times about how the intellectual culture at Harvard changed around 2014:

Students started showing up, determined that their job in a classroom was to humiliate one another and possibly catch a professor in saying something that was a violation of what they believed to be a way you can speak … This entire campus became incredibly prosecutorial.

She continued:

[I]t just surprises me to no end when people are like: Well, there was really never a problem on campuses. I don’t know what college campus they’re talking about … I just think it’s silly to deny that that existed, that it didn’t harm a lot of people, that it wasn’t wildly out of control on many occasions.

And in a subsequent conversation with Evan Goldstein of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Lepore went even further. She said that the culture at Harvard got so “miserable” that she felt like she could not do intellectual work anymore. She could not teach the way she wanted to teach, because students refused to read viewpoints that they disagreed with. She could not publish essays she wanted to publish because colleagues warned her that, for example, her writing comparing the #MeToo movement to various moral panics would “destroy [her] life.”

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

Top MAGA Influencers Accidentally Unmasked as Foreign Trolls: A new feature on Elon Musk’s X has given deeper insight into the online “America First” movement. (Jack Revell, Nov. 23 2025, Daily Beast)

Dozens of major accounts masquerading as “America First” or “MAGA” proponents have been identified as originating in places such as Russia, India, and Nigeria.

In one example, the account MAGANationX—with nearly 400,000 followers and a bio reading “Patriot Voice for We The People”—is actually based in Eastern Europe.

The funniest exposure since the Venona files.

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.