Long War

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.

IF THEY WERE THE MAJORITY THEY’D NOT NEED AUTHORITARIANISM:

Why Populism and Authoritarianism Go Hand in Hand: Populism is not anti-elitism, it is raw majoritarianism exercised via a strongman (Shikha Dalmia, Aug 08, 2024, The UnPopulist)

Populism is one of the few concepts that can help us make sense of the “current tectonic shifts in the political landscape and public opinion almost everywhere in the West and beyond,” notes Karen Horn, a classical liberal scholar at Germany’s University of Erfurt. To understand what populism is, it is useful to understand what it is not since the literature on it often lumps many disparate figures and phenomena, some good, some bad, obscuring the core concept. But if we lose clarity on the term, we will risk “defining away a pervasive phenomenon,” Horn notes, undercutting our ability to comprehend the danger it poses.

For starters, populist movements are not popular uprisings like the one Mahatma Gandhi led against British colonial rule in India and Nelson Mandela against white apartheid in South Africa. There are surface similarities, for example both are led by charismatic figures commanding a mass following. But that does not make these uprisings the same as Donald Trump’s MAGA movement or Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindutva (Hindu nationalism).

One big difference is that a popular uprising is a resistance movement against an illicit power that is ruling in explicit violation of the will of those it governs. Populist movements, on the other hand, are aimed at a domestic “establishment” which was formed with the consent of the people but over time has become corrupt—genuinely or allegedly.

Gandhi’s Quit India movement targeted a small—and alien—ruling power denying self-rule (and franchise) to an entire people. Some separatist movements, such as the one in Catalonia in Spain or the Kurds in Turkey and Iraq, are dubbed populist uprisings. Regardless of what one thinks of the justice of their demands, they are, however, more in the vein of anti-colonial struggles like Quit India given that they are directed against an “enemy without.”

Populist movements, by contrast, are a pathology specifically of established democracies where the people already have self-rule. However, the dominant majority feels that this rule no longer works for it because the establishment in control no longer cares for its wishes, or, worse, is actively hostile to it. So these movements are oriented against the “enemy within.” For example, Modi’s populist nationalism is directed against a secular elite that regards the majority Hindu population’s desire for a homogeneously Hindu India as anathema.

This last is a good example of why Populists turn to Authoritarianism: Indians generally do not support such homogeneity.

A RELIGION OF FORM, NOT SUBSTANCE:

Nineteenth Century French Catholics’ Challenge to Integralism (Jennifer Conner, 2023, Hillsdale Forum)

But not all nineteenth century Catholics felt that liberalism, and the tolerance it brought with it, was getting in the way of the common good. For these Catholics, liberal policies were the guarantors of the Church’s freedom, and a free Church ultimately brought about the common good. Freedom of the Church was a major concern in restoration France. The Concordat signed by Napoleon was still in effect, making Church officials salaried employees of the state and obliging clergy to swear an oath of loyalty to the French state. Historic Church lands were still in the possession of the state and the state monopolized education. The Church and state seemed to be working closely together, but it was hindering the Church.

In the newspaper L’Avenir, Henri Lacordaire argued that the Church needed “to rid itself of all solidarity with a power [the French state] which was not animated by [the Church’s] spirit, and to seek the exercise of the freedoms promised to every citizen.” Lacordaire argued that the French state was not acting in consonance with the Church’s best interests. Critically, his proposed solution is not immediately conforming the state to serve the Church’s interests but rather granting proper freedoms for every citizen. In his view, the state ought to allow the Church to function freely and fulfill its mission. This approach hearkens back to Augustine’s claims in City of God that the task of the state is to maintain peace so that the Church can function. This is very different from Vermeule’s integralist model. Rather than an elite religious group enforcing very particular moral standards from the top of the government, the state would promote tolerance and allow the Church to educate the citizenry and care for their souls. Only then would the people be virtuous, and when their virtuous interests were represented by their government, the laws would become more virtuous in turn, and serve the common good.

In Lacordaire’s view, as long as the state had, in principle, the power to suppress individual rights for the purposes of promoting Catholic ends, it also had the power to oppress the Church. The French state seemed to benefit the Church by bankrolling its officials, but the salaries came with strings attached, including state interference in Catholic education. Lacordaire took umbrage with this particular infringement and, with the help of Lamennais and Montalembert, opened an unsanctioned Catholic school for boys in Paris. Shortly after its opening, state officials came to close the school and seize the building. Lacordaire was forced to send the boys home and he only barely retained the building by claiming it as his residence and pointing to his sleeping mat in the corner of the classroom.

The solution, for Lacordaire, was not a return to an integrated Catholic monarchy, but to promote the separation of Church and state. The Church, he argued, “always had the words reason and liberty on her lips when the inalienable rights of the human race were threatened.” Lacordaire might have been inclined to agree with Joseph Ratzinger’s later explanation of liberty as “having to do with being given a home.” It was through the Church that an individual could reach his true home and true liberty, and in order to fully participate in the Church — to receive a Catholic education, for example — the state ought to adopt a policy of tolerance. Thus there are two kinds of “liberty” at play here: the one is the theological liberty of membership in the Church, and the other is a sort of political tolerance, or willingness to allow a political regime to remain agnostic on certain questions, at least temporarily.

Crucially—here Lacordaire’s liberalism differs from a kind of libertarianism which admits no vision of a common good—the separation of Church and state does not mean that religious values must always remain absent from the law. Ultimately, once individual souls have been gathered into the Church, their moral interests will be represented in popular government and therefore the positive laws of the state will accord more closely with morality. This is a process to be undertaken and it relies upon the conversion of souls; it is not a top-down fix predicated upon an all-knowing religious elite at the top of government foisting their views upon the hoi polloi.

When Lacordaire took Alexander de Tocqueville’s vacant seat in the Académie Francaise, an American reporter remarked that it was strange to see “a man so thoroughly imbued with the worship of the Catholic religion defend, before the world…liberty and equality.” As Lacordaire took the seat dressed in full Dominican habit — he had helped refound the Order of Preachers in France after its abolition during the Revolution — he saw no contradiction. At his induction, he delivered a powerful address affirming the consistency of sincere faith with tolerance, proclaiming his wish to “die a repentant religious and an unrepentant liberal.”