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      The Good Old Days: Nostalgia’s Political Appeal

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      Donald Trump is gone, yet his specter continues to haunt American politics. The UK is no longer part of the European Union, yet Brexit continues to provoke emotions on both sides of the Channel. Both Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election and the outcome of the Brexit referendum of 2016 were driven by a range of widespread and profound emotions. One of the most prominent was nostalgia.

      Nostalgia has been around for ages. The first one to recognize its significance was a Swiss doctor, Johannes Hofer. In 1688, Hofer coined the word — a compound derived from the Greek nostro, meaning “home,” and algos, meaning “pain” — to describe what he considered to be a medical malaise he detected among Swiss mercenary soldiers, expressed as a profound yearning for their home (what in German is called Heimweh — homesickness).

      Hofer might have drawn inspiration from Homer’s Odyssey. Its hero, after spending seven years in the company of the sea nymph Calypso, felt compelled to return home. The longing to see his home was so overwhelming that he rejected Calypso’s offer to make him immortal if he stayed.

      The Meaning of Nostalgia

      Since Hofer’s times, the meaning of nostalgia has both substantially changed and significantly broadened. It is no longer associated with homesickness. Instead, in today’s parlance, nostalgia stands for “a sentimental longing for one’s past.” More specifically, nostalgia stands for a yearning for an idealized, lost past, a past more often than not seen through rose-tinted glasses. For a long time, nostalgia was seen as a pathology, reflecting the refusal to confront an unpleasant present and an even worse future.

      In this view, the yearning for “an irretrievable past becomes a narcissistic illusion,” a “deflection from current unpleasant circumstances.” More recently, however, nostalgia is predominantly seen as a positive emotion, an effective coping mechanism in times of turmoil and crisis. In this case, nostalgia serves as “an important resource that helps people find meaning in life and regulate meaning-related distress.” In the face of tectonic demographic, technological and geopolitical changes, seeking comfort in a past where life was arguably simpler and easier to navigate is human, all too human. As Edoardo Campanella and Marta Dassu have put it, nostalgia “offers relief from socio-economic angst. Yesterday is associated with progress; tomorrow with stasis or regression.”  

      This type of nostalgia — because nostalgia comes in different guises — reflects “an affective yearning for a community with a collective memory, a longing for continuity in a fragmented world.” In this context, as Matthias Stephan has recently suggested, nostalgia represents “both a look back to an idealized past (whether real or imagined) and a hope that the romanticized past will become our future.”

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      Here, nostalgia “inevitably reappears as a defense mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals.” The author of these lines, Svetlana Boym, characterized this iteration as “restorative nostalgia.” Against this, Boym sets what she called “reflective nostalgia.” Reflective nostalgia accepts the fact that the past is past, that it cannot be retrieved. As Hal McDonald has put it, “This acknowledgment of the irretrievability of our autobiographical past provides an aesthetic distance that allows us to enjoy a memory in the same way that we enjoy a movie or a good book.”

      At the same time, it engenders a realistic, and perhaps even critical, view of the past. It is this constellation that makes nostalgia extremely political. In fact, because of its inherently binary nature, nostalgia is ideally suited to inform both progressive and reactionary politics.

      Today, nostalgia is primarily evoked on the nationalist right. More often than not, this is a type of nostalgia that depends on the “disparagement of the present,” which Christopher Lasch once considered the “hallmark of the nostalgic attitude.” Feeling discombobulated by and disenchanted with the present, as well as uneasy about the future, a growing number of people feel tempted to go down the memory lane and retreat to the past where, as the German expression goes, the world was presumably still in order.

      When the World Was in Order

      On the nationalist right, it is particularly radical right-wing populist parties and actors that have drawn the greatest political benefit from the appeal to nostalgia. Donald’s Trump is a prominent case in point. His campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” implies that there was a time when the United States was still great, that today it no longer is, but that tomorrow it will be great again — as long as the people follow The Donald.

      The promoters of Brexit played a similar tune. Nigel Farage, the former leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), holding up his new non-EU passport and triumphantly exclaiming, “We got our passports back!,” evoked a time when Great Britain still maintained the pretense to be a great power rather than one among 28 EU member states where it was not even primus inter pares. Once freed from the shackles of the EU, a once again completely sovereign Great Britain would regain its lost glory. Or, as Britain’s Secretary of Defense Gavin Williamson claimed in late 2018, once Britain was out of the European Union, it would become a “true global player,” establishing new military bases all over the world. As an article in the Financial Times from early 2016 put it, “Brexiters are Nostalgics in Search of a Lost Empire.”

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      Public opinion polls conducted a few months prior to the referendum provided ample evidence of the extent to which the British public glorified the country’s past. In early 2016, a YouGov poll found more than 40% of British respondents expressing pride in Britain’s colonial history; about the same number thought the British Empire had been a good thing. Only a fifth of respondents had a negative view. In a similar survey, two years earlier, around 50% of respondents thought that Britain’s former colonies were better off today because they had been part of the British Empire, while a third thought that it would be a good thing if Britain still had an empire. At the same, there were strong sentiments that Britain was in decline. In fact, some 80% of “leavers” shared that view in 2016.

      Hardly surprising that, in the wake of the referendum, one of Britain’s leading tabloids, The Daily Star, called on its readers to “Make Britain Great Again!” Nostalgia, paired with mass delusion and a portion of righteous resentment, obviously paid handsome political dividends — at least for Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and their comrades in arms.

      Similarly in the United States, Trump’s main slogan “Make America Great Again” appealed to widespread nostalgia, particularly among the country’s white majority. In September 2016, for instance, half of the respondents in the annual American Values Survey agreed with the statement that their country’s best days were “behind us.” A few months earlier, a Pew survey found more than 45% of respondents agreeing with the statement that compared to 50 years earlier, life for people like them had gotten worse.

      Among Trump supporters, three out of four agreed with that statement. In a similar vein, one year earlier, around half of US respondents in a representative poll thought that “America’s best days” were in the past. At the same time, in 2016, more than 60% of Americans believed their children would be worse off than they were. This is also reflected in surveys that seek to gauge what Americans think about, for instance, the American dream — the notion that hard work will allow them to get ahead.

      Most notably, these sentiments were particularly pronounced among America’s white population, far more than among African Americans, Hispanics and other minorities. Donald Trump, ever so tuned in to the grievances of white America, stoked the fire of white resentment, charging, at a town hall meeting in the fall of 2015, that “the American dream is in trouble,” only to add the promise that with him in the White House, “we will get it back.” To be sure, this was hardly original. Four years earlier, the Republican Platform already committed to “Restoring the American Dream.”

      The Good Old Days

      Conjuring up idealized images of the good old days is a crucial tool in the ideational repertoire of nativist and national-populist parties and actors. And for good reasons. For one, the evocation of nostalgic fantasies creates a sense of collective identity, community and a common purpose, all of them of central concern on the radical populist right. At the same time, in the hands of radical right-wing populists, nostalgia serves as an indirect indictment of the present, linked to an appeal to the notion that the best of the past could somehow replace the current situation.

      Here, nostalgia represents what S. D. Chrostowska has called a “malaise of dissatisfaction with the present and the direction that present” has taken. The more profound and widespread collective disenchantment with the present happens to be, the more pronounced is the appeal of the past. An exemplary case in point is a sociological study from 2016 in Poland, whose authors explored the extent to which nostalgia for the communist period was prevalent among current-day Poles. The results were striking. They showed that people who felt they had been better off during that period than at present were much more nostalgic and had a significantly better opinion about the communist government than other respondents.

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      Poland is hardly unique. The arguably best-known case of post-communist nostalgia is what in German is known as Ostalgie. Ostalgie entails a revaluation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) — former East Germany — on the part of a substantial part of its population following reunification. To a large extent, this was in response to “the perceived threat of a West German depreciation of their life experiences.” Substantial numbers of citizens in the east had the feeling that they and their past were treated with condescension, if not outright disdain. Even 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the sentiment that easterners are second-class citizens finds widespread resonance in what once was the GDR. Ostalgie is all about a demand for recognition, dignity and respect rather than crude material interests. As sociologist Cecilia Ridgeway has noted, we tend to forget “how much people care about public acknowledgement of their worth.”

      Yet they tend to “care about status quite as intensely as they do [about] money and power.” They want “to be someone.” Ostalgie is also informed by the sentiment that in the GDR, ordinary workers were valued — they were someone. Not for nothing, the GDR prided itself on being an Arbeiter und Bauernstaat — the state of workers and farmers.

      Nostalgia in post-communist societies might be somewhat puzzling to outside observers, yet politically it is of no consequences. There is no craving for a return of what in German was known as Realsozialismus — loosely translated as “actually existing socialism.” A regime that imprisoned its citizens behind walls, barbed wires and minefields in order to prevent them from fleeing the country has nothing in common with the radical humanist spirit of socialism, reflected, for instance, in Karl Marx’s “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844” and the writings of leading exponents of the Frankfurt School.

      Radical Reconstruction

      Matters are entirely different when populist leaders use nostalgia for the dismantling and radical (from the roots) reconstitution of a society’s collective identity. This is what has happened with two of the most important contemporary populist regimes: Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey and Narendra Modi’s India. At first sight, the two cases could not be more different. Here, a representative of political Islam, there, of political Hinduism. Yet below the surface, the similarities are quite striking.

      These similarities are seen, in particular, in the place nostalgia — and the appeal to nostalgia — has in the rhetoric of both leaders. In the Turkish case, nostalgia is reflected in what Turkish observers have called neo-Ottomanism. Erdogan, as Hakan Yavuz has argued, has been seeking “to remold Turkey in the form of an imagined, ahistorical conceptualization of the former Ottoman Empire.” The ultimate objective is “to resurrect a powerful Muslim state in the ancestral mold of the former Ottoman Empire.”

      At the same time, Erdogan’s political project represents a frontal assault on and complete disavowal of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s foundation of the modern “Kemalist” Turkish state. This project was based on a progressive, secular vision of equality adopted from the French Revolution. Here, citizenship and identity derive from a common adherence to civic principles; in the case of Erdogan’s project, citizenship and identity derive from adherence to a common ethno-religious community, which bodes ill for Turkey’s minorities such as Kurds and Armenians.

      In the Indian case, Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party, BJP), has never made a secret of the fact that it seeks to eradicate the legacy of Nehruvian secularism and replace it with Hindutva. Long before Modi became prime minister, the BJP mobilized against what it called Nehru’s “pseudo-secularism.” In reality, the BJP charged, secularism discriminated against Hindus while according concessions to India’s sizeable Muslim minority. In fact, in 2018, Sonia Gandhi admitted that the BJP had managed to convince a sizeable portion of the Indian public that the Indian National Congress was a pro-Muslim and, implicitly, anti-Hindu party.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Central to the BJP’s ideology is the myth of the Vedic golden age, exemplified, in particular, by the reign of the mythical Ram, largely seen as the epitome of India’s golden age. This golden age came to an abrupt end with the Muslim invasion and conquest, which ushered in what Modi has characterized as “1,200 years of slavery.” This is the central trope of Hindu nationalist historiography and victimology — the juxtaposition of “a glorious Hindu golden age followed by an era of Muslim oppression.”

      In order to bolster their case of that golden age, Hindu nationalists have gone to great lengths, in some cases transcending into the ridiculous. A case in point is the various claims that in ancient times, India already achieved stunning scientific and technological accomplishments, from advanced reproductive technologies to stem cell research, “spacecraft, the internet, and nuclear weapons — long before Western science come on the scene.” More often than not, these claims were advanced not by crackpots but by respected scientists fallen under the sway of Hindu nationalist nostalgia.

      In both cases, the combination of nostalgia and populism serves to mobilize the “true” people against a Westernized elite, from — but not of — the people. At the same time, it serves as a means to eradicate national humiliations: in the case of India, centuries of being subjugated to Islamic rulers; in the Turkish case, the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire following World War I, symbolized by the Treaty of Sèvres which, had it ever been implemented, would have left only a small area around Ankara under Turkish rule.  

      Erdogan’s recent decision to reclassify the Hagia Sophia — once the “ultimate icon of Christian civilization” — as a mosque, constitutes a reversal of Kemalist “secularist suppression.” Similarly, laying the foundations of a Ram temple on the site of an ancient mosque, known as Babri Masjid, in the city of Ayodhya in northern India, serves as highly visible expressions of the will to reverse — and perhaps even avenge — the past.

      Resurrecting Grievances

      The arguably most successful populist resort to this combination of grievance-based nostalgia and the exploitation of national humiliation is epitomized by Hungary’s Victor Orban. To be sure, Hungarians have good reasons for historically-grounded grief — the bloody suppression of the Hungarian people’s 1956 uprising against the communist regime and the Soviets is a prominent case in point. The most important episode, however, which continues to haunt Hungarian collective national consciousness until today, dates back to 1920, when the victorious powers imposed on Hungary the Trianon Treaty. The treaty deprived Hungary of two-thirds of its prewar territory and three-fifths of its prewar population, which turned Hungary into what Stanley Payne has called “the most nationally aggrieved state in all of Europe.”

      Victor Orban has been particularly adroit not only in manipulating diffuse sentiments of humiliation and resentment but also in evoking nostalgia for Hungary’s golden age. This was the period spanning from the formation of the dual monarchy following Vienna’s defeat in the Austro-Prussian war of 1866, which put the Hungarians on par with the Austrians until the end of the First World War — a period which saw all ethnic Hungarians united in the same state. Together, these two ideational elements constitute the core of Orban’s national-populist project, which over the past decade or so has progressively gained cultural hegemony in Hungary.

      Orban, Modi and Erdogan are prominent examples of how nationalist-populist actors have weaponized nostalgia for political gain the same way they have weaponized other emotions such as anxiety, anger and empathy. As Yale professor Paul Bloom has recently pointed out in his indictment of emotional empathy, “unscrupulous politicians use our empathy for victims of certain crimes to motivate anger and hatred toward other, marginalized, groups.” Emblematic of this strategy is Donald Trump’s exploitation of “our empathic feelings toward victims of rape and assault to build hatred toward undocumented immigrants.”

      Here, Trump instinctively exploited a central characteristic of this emotion, namely its intrinsic in-group bias. Neuropsychological studies suggest that more often than not, empathy extends significantly more to those we feel close to rather than out-groups, “potentially making them likely targets for prejudice and discrimination.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      The same is true for nostalgia. Experiments in social psychology have shown that collective nostalgia — the type of nostalgia routinely evoked by national populist actors — tends to confer “sociability benefits,” such as support and loyalty, to the in-group while tending to evoke exclusionary sentiments toward out-groups. Constantine Sedikides and Tim Wildschut have argued that “Collective nostalgia’s sociality is amenable to exploitation and can have controversial ramifications.” A recent empirical study on the effect of national nostalgia on out-group perceptions in the context of the 2016 US presidential election shows that national nostalgia “significantly predicted racial prejudice and this relationship was mediated by perceived outgroup threat.”

      This also holds true for Europe. A Bertelsmann study on nostalgia from 2018 found that more than three-quarters of European respondents classified as nostalgics (two-thirds of the sample) agreed with the statement that recent immigrants did not want to integrate into the host society; more than half thought they were taking jobs away from the natives. Under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that radical right-wing populist parties have found fertile ground for their nativist politics of exclusion.

      A case in point is the adoption of the concept of the folkhemmet by the Sweden Democrats, the country’s radical populist right. The folkhemmet (people’s home) stands for the heydays of Sweden’s Social Democratic welfare state, a golden age that spanned four decades, from the 1930s to the 1970s. This was a time of ethnocultural homogeneity, civic egalitarianism and social solidarity. The Sweden Democrats’ adoption of the sentimental notion of the folkhemmet appeals to nostalgic sentiments while, at the same time, serving as a justification for the exclusion of non-ethnic minorities such as refugees from social benefits.

      The Sweden Democrats’ manipulation of nostalgia in the service of their politics of welfare chauvinism is exemplary of the flexible and polyvalent possibilities of applying this emotion. It is for this reason that nostalgia lends itself ideally to national populist mobilization. One of the central ideational tropes informing populism is the notion of the united people, a unity derived from a shared past and a common destiny, confronting a common adversary, if not an enemy. The evocation of a glorious past is a great way to make people feel good about themselves at a time when there is little to be cheerful or optimistic about.

      These days, the glorious past is not far away, not more than two years, the time before social distancing, lockdowns and vaccination jitters. Under the circumstances, nostalgia is likely to persist, ready to be exploited by populist entrepreneurs for political gain. Those who still think that the pandemic will substantially weaken support for the radical populist right might take a look at Spain. There, Vox, whose rhetoric is replete with nostalgia, is the only party that has substantially increased its support base over the past several months.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      White Trash, White Privilege

      by

      I grew up in southern Bavaria in the 1960s. I started formal education at the age of six at the local Volksschule — the people’s school. Quite frankly, I don’t remember much about this time. Among the few things I do remember is the warning my parents gave me on my way to school to keep away from the Rs. The Rs were a couple of kids from the same family, one of whom happened to be in my class. They came from the “bad” side of town, the Glasscherbenviertel. In my hometown, this was an area located behind a horse and motorcycle race track, a place where respectable citizens wouldn’t want to be caught dead. Those who lived there were dismissed as Grattler — uncouth, unsavory characters better avoided. And avoid them we did, if only not to run the danger of getting beaten up.

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      In our little town, the Rs were the epitome of what across the Atlantic is referred to as “white trash.” At the time in Germany, there was hardly anyone who looked “different,” so “white trash” would have made no sense whatsoever. They were German trash, and everybody knew it. In my immediate neighborhood, there was a woman who had three “illegitimate” children, all of them girls, all of them with a reputation of being tomboys. My parents, of course, told me I better keep my distance. I did, if only to avoid being bombarded with stones — the weapon, at the time, of the weaker sex — and, of course, out of fear of being associated with German trash.

      America’s Outcasts

      These are some of the reminiscences, images and thoughts that recently crossed my mind while reading parts of Nancy Isenberg’s “White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America.” Released in 2016, a few months before the presidential election, the book is as pertinent — if not more so — today as it was at the time it was published. This is the story of the outcasts of American society, the vagrants and “crackers,” the rednecks and the “deplorables” who “have remained vilified, shunned, targeted and kept apart, both physically — in poorhouses and trailer parks, through eugenic science and discriminatory public policy — and in the nation’s cultural imagination, where they have inspired mockery, kitsch and unceasing grimaces.”  

      For anyone who has ever watched an episode of “The Jerry Springer Show” knows what I’m talking about. With 28 seasons and around 4,000 episodes, it was not only one of America’s most successful TV series but also an export hit that exposed the rest of the world to the other side of America in the crudest way. The show was so successful because it systematically brought out some of the worst in human nature while at the same time fulfilling the “audience’s need to feel superior.” It reinforced age-old stereotypes that dismissed a part of America’s white population as “incestuous and sexually promiscuous, violent, alcoholic, lazy and stupid” — stereotypes, as Isenberg put it, that “remain with us until today.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      A case in point is the methamphetamine epidemic that the American Drug Enforcement Administration in 2003 characterized as “the most dangerous drug problem of small-town America.” In fact, what distinguished meth was that the drug was most prevalent in rural areas in the country’s heartland, where it was “burning a hole,” as Rolling Stone magazine put it, “through rural America.” What also distinguished it was that, unlike, for instance, crack cocaine, which is predominantly associated with inner cities and people of color, meth was largely characterized as a white-trash addiction. As Frank Keating, the former governor of Oklahoma, put it in 1999, meth was “a white trash drug — methamphetamines largely are consumed by the lower socio-economic element of white people. And I think we need to shame it, just like crack cocaine was a black-trash drug and is a black trash drug.”

      The same applies to a certain extent to what Joshua Wilkey, in his blog This Appalachia Life, has called the “white-trashification of the opioid crisis.” Wilkey’s charges the political establishment in Washington with not giving “two shits” about the crisis, at least as long as it affects primarily the rural poor in depressed areas such as the Appalachians. At least two reasons account for this: first, the notion that addiction “is simply the result of stupid people making poor choices” and, second, that since the crisis “largely targets poor and rural areas, there’s less urgency on the part of urban elites to advocate for solutions.” To put it more brutally, white trash just doesn’t matter, if only because it does not conform to the dominant narrative — in which whiteness represents the “default racial norm” — that serves as the justification for white socioeconomic dominance.

      White Privilege

      At the same time, the trope poses a challenge to the notion of white privilege, for white trash is a term that racializes whiteness by denigrating those dismissed as such “in race specific terms.” One way to get out of this quandary is to relabel a clearly derogatory racialized epithet as “pseudo-racialization.” For the guardians of this type of wokeness — largely derived from critical race theory prevalent today in American academia and the chattering classes — this might sound reassuring. It shouldn’t, at least if wokeness is taken seriously. It should not be forgotten that wokeness is defined as “a state of being aware, especially of social problems such as racism and inequality.”

      The derogation, denigration and disparagement of, if not outright contempt for, America’s white underclass, mocked and dismissed as white trash, certainly counts for an egregious example of inequality alongside a range of dimensions — economic, social and cultural. White trash is the Lumpenproletariat of our globalized world, structurally irrelevant and, therefore, largely ignored — at least as long as it doesn’t become a threat to society as it did during the meth epidemic.

      Worse still, as the notion of pseudo-racialization implies, the distress and despair of the white underclass are easily dismissed since its problems fall through the dominant grievances grid that today is almost exclusively informed by and defined in racial terms. What Ernesto Laclau has once called the “internal antagonistic frontier” that informs today’s hegemonic wokeness discourse runs between whites and everybody else. In this discourse, whiteness is automatically associated with privilege and entitlement. The white maligned underclass might be underprivileged or worse, but, being white, it is automatically subsumed under notions of privilege and entitlement for no other reason than that one so happens to be white.

      The case of Oumou Kanoute, a black student at Smith College, which was recently featured in The New York Times, illustrates the point. Here even Michelle Goldberg, in her recent defense of critical race theory, had to acknowledge that something went horribly wrong, that this was a case of “woke overreach.” Smith College is one of the most prestigious — and expensive — liberal arts colleges in the US. Students attending the college are the epitome of entitlement, given the prohibitive cost of tuition and board that easily amounts to nearly $80,000 a year. An article in The Guardian from 2016 hit the nail on the head when it pointed out that “at the best colleges there are very few low-income students, except for a few lucky enough to grow up in New York City, Los Angeles or Boston.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      As The New York Times account rightly put it, the Smith College incident is a story of the clash between race and class. Once again, class came out at the short end of the stick, resulting in the destruction of the reputations of a number of employees, all of them white, all of them part of today’s easily dispensable service class — janitors, security guards — who were labeled as racists and as carriers of white privilege. Yet, as a subsequent commentary piece in The New York Times put it, “the narrative of racist harassment of a minority student at an elitist white institution turned out to be comprehensively false.” Does it matter? Apparently not, for as the initial report by The Times put it, the whole story “highlights the tensions between a student’s deeply felt sense of personal truth and facts that are at odds with it.” In short, something must be true because you think it is true. This might explain why even after an investigation exonerated the employees of racial bias, they received, unlike the student, no apology from the administration. The white underclass apparently is not worthy of recognition.

      Dispensable Service Class

      The incident happened in 2018. In the meantime, Oumou Kanoute has moved on to Columbia University, another elite university. The fate of the targets of her accusations is largely unknown. But then, who cares about janitors and security guards? This is hardly a rhetorical question. According to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation, in 2019, the white poverty rate was 9%. This amounts to more than 17 million Americans. Poverty rates were disproportionately high (around 15%) in West Virginia and Kentucky, two Appalachian states, which were also among the top states when it comes to opioid prescription rates.

      The impact was devastating. In 2017, the opioid-related death rate in Appalachian counties was more than 70% higher than in the rest of the country: 24 versus 14 deaths per 100,000 residents. At the same time, the rate of Kentucky’s neonatal abstinence syndrome was more than three times higher than the national rate, West Virginia’s more than eight times.

      The testimony, recently published in a medical journal, of a physician who grew up in eastern Kentucky provides a first-hand account of the misery and despair the epidemic has wrought. Eastern Kentucky, a coal-mining area at the foot of the Appalachian hills, is among the poorest in the United States. Isolated and on the margins “both geographically and culturally,” the region and its opioid crisis were long ignored by the national media.

      It was not until “it had spread to more affluent and valued parts of the country, almost 15 years later” that it would gain national attention. This is despite the fact that the region is overwhelmingly white. Magoffin County, for instance, which is the focus of the physician’s account, in 2000 was roughly 99% white. But then, who gives two shits about poor white trash — except, perhaps, to make money. Otherwise, why would Amazon sell a “Funny Kentucky White Trash Tee Shirt”?

      In late 2016, an expose in The Atlantic on America’s poor white underclass noted the “barely suppressed contempt” that “has characterized much of the commentary about white woe, on both the left and the right.” In support of their observation, the authors cite a philippic that appeared in the National Review, the flagship of the traditional conservative right, heaping scorn on low-income white voters for supporting Donald Trump in the primaries. Among other things, the author sneered:

      “If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog — you will come to an awful realization. … The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. … The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles.”

      In 2016, Trump won an overwhelming majority in eastern Kentucky. In Magoffin County, for instance, he won roughly 75% of the vote. Four years later, Trump once again carried Kentucky by a wide margin; the same was true for Magoffin County. And yet, in his four years in office, he had done little to nothing to improve the lives of America’s poor white underclass. To be sure, at one point, Trump had claimed he would revive the coal industry so dear to states like West Virginia and Kentucky. He didn’t, and, like any good populist, once in power, he largely ignored the plight of those whose pain he had earlier purported to hear. As studies have shown, America’s poor, independent of race, by and large don’t vote and, therefore, can be dismissed. They don’t count, in more than one sense of the word.

      Farewell to the Proletariat

      Unfortunately, the left on both sides of the Atlantic has, to a large extent, bought into this trope. Instead of fighting for every vote, the left has written off significant segments of a potential electorate which, at one point, was part of its natural constituency. Yet in the late 1970s, at least in Western Europe, the left abandoned the concerns of blue-collar workers in favor of new “postmaterialist” priorities, promoted by the “new middle classes.” A paradigmatic text was André Gorz’s manifesto from 1980, “Adieux au proletariat” (“Farewell to the Proletariat”). In the decades that followed, the left increasingly adopted what has come to be known as identity politics, centering upon questions of gender, ethnicity and race.

      There is nothing wrong with identity politics — as long as it is inclusive. Following Chantal Mouffe, the potential of progressive politics crucially depends on the establishment of an alternative “powerbloc” that not only unifies different claims and struggles, such as the #MeToo, Black Lives Matter and Fridays for Future movements, but is also able to effectively challenge the dominant power structure and the hegemonic narratives, such as neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus. Identity politics on the left these days focuses on minorities, such as LGBTQ and particularly race, in the process sidelining, excluding, if not outright dismissing questions of class. As one reader who identified himself as a “white man living paycheck to paycheck” put it in The Atlantic, “I think that most of us would acknowledge that minorities have it rough, but at least someone seems to care about them.”

      In the end, a strategy that focuses almost exclusively on an anything-but-white identity politics — if it is at all a strategy — is only going to weaken any genuine hope for a more equitable politics. At the same time, it is likely to provide fertile ground for the exploitation of resentment and anger by cynical populists such as Donald Trump well versed in the deceptive appeal of symbolic politics, like feeding into delusions of white superiority, while doing nothing concrete, like raising marginal tax rates on the rich to pay for universal health care, for the “ordinary people” they purport to represent.  

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      The Complex Role of Racism Within the Radical Right

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      Several political parties and governments around the world have centered their commitment to countering the radical right on tackling hate and racism. The most recent example was the announcement by the German cabinet in late 2020 to spend €1 billion ($1.2 billion) for a four-year program on combating “right-wing extremism, racism and antisemitism.”       

      There is no doubt that such political agendas are well intended, and most citizens would agree that racism is not consistent with their society’s democratic values. As US President Joe Biden put it in his inaugural speech, two weeks after the deadly storming of the US Capitol Building on January 6: “Our history has been a constant struggle between the American ideal that we are all created equal and the harsh, ugly reality that racism, nativism, fear, and demonization have long torn us apart. The battle is perennial.”

      How the Left and the Right Radicalize Each Other

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      Tackling racism deserves firm political commitment in its own right, and it certainly has a place within a multi-pronged strategy to countering violent extremism (CVE) on the radical right. But is there a tendency to overestimate the efficacy of anti-racism initiatives at the expense of other prevention and intervention measures within the CVE space?  

      Related to this, what role does racism play within the radical right? While it is widely acknowledged that there is no unanimously agreed definition of right-wing extremism or radicalism, most experts in the field consider racism to be a very common feature or, at the very least, one of the “accompanying characteristics” of right-wing extremism. This centrality of racism seems to have led many into thinking that tackling racist hate is a particularly effective way of countering right-wing extremism.

      What Kind of Racism?

      Decades of extensive scholarship — and the lived experiences of those affected — have emphasized that racism is systemic and interpersonal; it is attitudinal, behavioral and structural; and it can draw on biological social constructs and on cultural or religious markers, actual or perceived. At least one (or many) manifestation of racism is present across all radical–right groups. But what kind of racism?

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      The diversity of radical–right movements and groups is well understood in academia, and there have been numerous attempts to develop typologies that capture divergent groups under the umbrella of right-wing extremism. Exclusivist and anti-egalitarian beliefs are a common denominator, but articulations of racism differ across various radical right groups, movements and ideologies. These nuances are important but often overlooked in public and political debates.

      Some elements of the radical right, for example, mobilize in particular against Islam, expressing primarily anti-Muslim racism. This applies to what is often referred to as “counter-jihad” movements (a self-attributed and ideologized misnomer in many ways) and the anti-Islam protests that swept across Europe and Australia in the second half of 2010s. Non-white people are usually welcome there as long as they share anti-Islam sentiments. For example, in Australia, where most of my research has taken place, it was also not uncommon to see radical-right protesters at these rallies displaying Aboriginal flags and insisting they were reclaiming Australia from Islam also on behalf of indigenous Australians.

      These anti-Islam groups and movements differ from white supremacy organizations. For example, one Australian white supremacy group expressed its disagreement with those prominent anti-Islam movements as thus: “We do not believe in multiculturalism minus Islam.” Of course, these boundaries are blurry. There have been personal overlaps, and some radical–right groups with explicitly neo-Nazi convictions have strategically used the anti-Muslim movements to recruit more people to their white supremacy and antisemitic agenda.

      Another example that illustrates the complex, fluid and sometimes contested role that different forms of racism play within the radical right are the Proud Boys in the United States. Founded as a self-described Western chauvinistic boys club by Gavin McInnes in 2016 with an explicit, culturally racist and misogynistic profile, the group quickly adopted the markers of a white supremacist network, despite its chairman, Enrique Tarrio, being himself of Afro-Cuban descent. Infighting between Tarrio and another openly antisemitic and white supremacist leading figure (who reportedly referred to Tarrio as a “token negro”) in late 2020 revealed the internal fractions — all racist, yes, but racist in different ways.

      Racism as an Indicator of Radical-Right Ideology

      While people associated with or sympathetic to radical–right movements generally seem to hold racist views, the majority of those with such exclusionary or prejudiced attitudes toward certain ethnic, racial, cultural or religious minorities are not affiliated with right-wing extremism or radicalism. Attitude surveys across the Western world — from North America, the UK and Europe to Australia — have shown high rates of anti-Muslim sentiments and prejudice, expressed sometimes (depending on the country and the nature of the survey questions) by a majority of the surveyed population. Some surveys revealed that a substantial proportion of respondents also express biological racist views. According to the results of the European Social Survey a few years ago, 18% in the British sample agreed that “some races or ethnic groups are born less intelligent.” Considering the possibility of social desirability effects, we can only speculate as to whether this figure underestimates the true prevalence of biological racism.

      Embed from Getty Images

      It is impossible to determine how many of those who hold anti-Muslim or other racist views are affiliated or identify with the radical right — certainly not all of them and probably only a small portion. This is not to disregard the higher susceptibility among these segments of society to mobilization and recruitment efforts of radical–right groups. The path into the radical right is slippery. A former radical–right activist, Ivan Humble, recalled how he became a member of the English Defence League: “I didn’t identify as racist at the time, but I began to zero in on Muslim people in the belief that they were attacking the country I lived in, and that our society was being torn apart as a result. In hindsight, this was such a blinkered view but I couldn’t see it.”

      In our recent research in Australia, we identified several factors that may help analyze the questions as to where and when racism becomes an indicator for radical–right ideologies. We conducted in-depth interviews with people who were invited to speak with us about the concerns they had about diversity and immigration in Australia. We found that most of those we interviewed expressed anti-Muslim racism and other forms of cultural racism, but our analysis concluded that only some of them were affiliated with the radical right. In what way did their articulation of racism differ?

      1. Racism as Part of a Larger Meta-Narrative

      Our analysis suggests that it is important to understand if, and how, racism is functionally embedded in a larger meta-narrative. Among those on the radical right, racism was not “only” an exclusivist personal attitude but part of an ideological system, built on conspiratorial thinking about a secretive global elite seeking to destroy Australian society and culture. They agitated against ethnic or religious minorities, but they often did so with a bigger enemy in mind, which they accused of pushing immigration and multiculturalism to pursue an evil agenda.

      This is also illustrated in a speech by a central figure of Australia’s radical right addressing a public demonstration in early 2019, where he insisted that immigrants and blacks were not the main problem. The real enemies were, according to him, “those who bring these people into our country.”

      Another soon-to-be-published CRIS study by Victoria University and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that the radical right in Australia extensively used the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests for their online mobilization, but, notwithstanding prevalent expressions of racism, a salient argument was that black BLM activists both in the US and Australia were only “useful idiots,” controlled by an alleged communist or Jewish (or both) cabal for their sinister goals.  

      2. Racism and Political Activism

      The second factor that can help identify how racism spills over into radical–right ideologies is related to individuals’ willingness to act upon their attitudes. This addresses important aspects of the behavioral dimension of racism (and of radical–right movements).

      Some in our fieldwork who have displayed racist attitudes expressed no desire to make these feelings public or try to convince others. Rather the opposite was the case: They deliberately avoid conversations about these issues — at least with those they expect may disagree with — and they explicitly denied being politically active. In contrast, those we considered to be associated with the radical right stated they were on a mission to “educate” others — for example, on social media — and they had been actively involved in a range of public rallies. They proudly accepted the label of being a “political activist.” 

      3. Language and “Collective Identity”

      The third factor that may help assess to what extent someone’s racist expressions may be an indicator for a radical–right affiliation relates to the language and symbols used. Certain expressions such as “race traitor” or “white genocide,” and symbols such as 1488 or the use of (((triple brackets))) to indicate alleged Jewishness, are popular within segments of far-right discourses and point to what researchers Pete Simi and Steven Windisch call “identity talk”: “a discursive practice to demonstrate that an individual’s identity is consistent with the perceived collective identity of the movement.”

      The meaning and political message of symbols and terms can change over time: On the one hand, previously neutral symbols are coopted by parts of the radical right (e.g., Pepe the Frog or the “OK” hand signal reappropriated to represent white power), and on the other hand, terms that used to be characteristic for the radical right (e.g., New World Order, Social Justice Warrior) have become mainstream and lost their distinctiveness.

      Countering the Radical Right by Tackling Racism

      What does all this mean for countering the radical right? As mentioned above, measures aimed at tackling racism are important tools for promoting community cohesion, belonging and safety, and they can also play a role in reducing the pool of people who may be more susceptible to far-right mobilization. As such, anti-racism strategies form a vital part of what has come to be known as preventing violent extremism (PVE).

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      As an intervention tool within countering violent extremism (CVE) strategies, however, the potential efficacy of anti-racism approaches seems overrated. Racism may be a salient or “accompanying characteristic” of radical–right movements. While it may contribute to someone’s pathway toward becoming actively involved in the radical–right milieu, the relationship between racism and engagement with the radical right is often better described in terms of correlation than causation.

      If CVE programs intend to address the root causes of why people sympathize and engage with the radical right, they need to look further and beyond racism. Primarily focusing on ideological factors and trying to convince people that racism is “bad” is insufficient, even if complemented by legislative, security and law enforcement intervention. This is because such “corrections” can often lead to further negative backfire effects.

      It is therefore widely acknowledged among CVE scholars and practitioners that countering the radical right requires multifaceted and targeted programs tackling psychological, social and, ultimately, societal questions around personal grievances and people’s desire for purpose, respect and connectedness. When designing CVE interventions with the radical right in mind, it often requires holding back with moral judgments and showing empathy to those who have dehumanized others in order to further stem the harms posed by such activism. 

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Fascism and Peace: Incompatible or Inseparable?

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      For Benito Mussolini, life was an eternal struggle. Shaped by a social Darwinist worldview and following Georges Sorel’s philosophy of the virtue of violence, Il Duce (the leader), as Mussolini was known, regarded war as men’s essential purpose in life. It was through war that he intended to revolutionize Italian society and politics, destroy Italian vices like corruption, regionalism and individualism, and create the “new man” — a masculine, athletic peasant-soldier. Il Duce was convinced that “the character of the Italians must be forged in combat.”

      However, in January 1940, he confessed to his son-in-law and then-foreign minister, Galeazzo Ciano, that so far he had failed in this task: “Have you ever seen a lamb become a wolf? The Italian people is a race of sheep. Eighteen years is not enough to change them. It takes a hundred and eighty years or maybe a hundred and eighty centuries.”

      The New Man in Fascism Past and Present

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      However, it is not only Mussolini’s militaristic and violent rhetoric that put violence, war and struggle at the core of fascism. Il Duce and the fascist regime also followed up with violent action. Whether it was the bloody clashes between the fascist blackshirts and the Socialists in the 1920s, the brutal oppression of native rebellions in Libya in the 1920s and 1930s, the war crimes in Ethiopia or the atrocities committed during the Second World War, violence and war were fundamentally linked to the history of fascism. It is then not surprising that scholars who have attempted to define fascism emphasize the violent characteristics in an effort to capture the essence of the only “genuine ideology” of the 20th century, as Mussolini proudly called it in 1932.

      A Mutilated Victory

      Thus, the question arises: Where does “peace” fit in? Or was “peace” totally alien to fascist thinking and ideology? According to Johan Galtung, the founder of the Peace Research Institute Oslo, we can distinguish between a “positive” and a “negative peace.” Whereas the former refers to a constructive resolution of conflict and the creation of a social and political system that serves the needs of everybody, the latter refers to the absence of violence. How did fascists perceive a positive peace as promoted by Western democracies and new institutions such as the League of Nations after World War I? Did fascists’ long-term plans entail references to peace — at least in the sense of Galtung’s negative peace?

      Thomas Nipperdey began his history on 19th century Germany with the now famous words: “At the beginning was Napoleon.” When analyzing Italian fascism’s relationship to peace, one could make a similar statement: At the beginning was World War I. A majority of fascists, including Mussolini, Dino Grandi and Achille Starace, were staunch interventionists who were totally disappointed and appalled by the outcome of the Paris Peace Conference. They regarded the treaties as a betrayal to their own war commitment and perceived them as unjust terms that were forced onto Italy by Great Britain and France. When referring to these agreements, they commonly used the words “mutilated victory,” a slogan coined by Italian nationalist and poet Gabriele D’Annunzio.

      Embed from Getty Images

      When assessing the slogan’s devastating consequences for Italy’s political scene, it can only be compared with the infamous German Dolchstosslegende — the stab-in-the-back myth used by the German far right (including the National Socialists) against the Weimar Republic. On the one hand, Italian fascists used the mutilated victory myth against Italian liberals, whom they blamed for a failed negotiation strategy in Paris and consequently labeled traitors to the Italian nation. On the other hand, it was used to attack Western democracies accused of trying to stop Italy from taking its rightful place on the international stage.

      Interestingly, the phrase itself exposes the fascists’ preference for martial rhetoric. Instead of using the term “peace treaties,” the slogan “mutilated victory” implies an ongoing struggle as well as powerfully evoking those who returned from the war wounded. These soldiers who sacrificed themselves for the greater good of their fatherland had been shamefully betrayed by both Western democracies and liberal Italian politicians. Therefore, it is not surprising that one of the main goals of Italian fascism was to seek a revision of the postwar peace order and thus turn a “mutilated victory” into a “true victory” for Italy.

      The Rejection of Peace

      The fascists’ attitude toward the Paris Peace Treaties is just one example that illustrates their overall stance toward the peaceful order democracies sought to create following World War I. In 1932, when the regime in Rome celebrated its 10-year anniversary, the government published the “Doctrine of Fascism,” written mainly by Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile. It contained one of the rare references to peace in an official government document, stating: “Fascism does not … believe in the possibility or utility of perpetual peace. It therefore discards pacifism as a cloak for cowardly supine renunciation in contradistinction to self-sacrifice. … War alone keys up all human energies to their maximum tension and sets the seal of nobility on those peoples who have the courage to face it.”  

      This rejection of peace was not solely confined to the international arena; it also applied to domestic politics. The government attempted to infuse this anti-pacifistic attitude, which became a guiding doctrine for the fascists’ social and political agenda, into the every-day life of its citizens. The Italian new man was meant to embrace a fighting spirit, accept all kinds of risks and should not shy away from self-sacrifice. This concept of life mirrored the philosophy of Futurists such as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who intended, as he outlined in his “Futurist Manifesto” of 1919, “to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness” and embraced “courage, audacity and revolt.”

      This concept of life stood in contrast to the bourgeois lifestyle, which the fascists rejected as individualistic, feminine and weak. A bourgeois society, according to fascist doctrine, was only able to survive if it created what fascism despised the most: long-lasting peace. For Mussolini, the embodiment of such a society was Great Britain. He explained to Ciano that he had “studied the different generations of the English people. He observed that 22 million men faced 24 million women and that 12 million citizens were over 50 years old and thus have crossed the line of belligerent desires. Consequently, the static masses dominated the youthful-dynamic ones. That means: quiet life, ready for compromises, peace.” Compromise and peace, however, were, in the fascist worldview, obvious signs of weakness, cowardice and decay.

      This quote leads to a final point. Whether in domestic affairs or in international politics, fascists rejected any kind of status quo. They defined their movement as dynamic, led by a charismatic leader who was energetic and powerful and always moving forward. Mussolini himself, portrayed as the nation’s soldier number one and a reincarnation of the condottiere — a leader of mercenaries in Renaissance Italy — claimed that he was born to never let the Italian people rest. A positive peace, however, would maintain and safeguard a certain status quo and thus undermine the fascists’ constructed self-image of a dynamic movement. Robert Paxton argues that a fascist movement must constantly renew itself and challenge the status quo. If it fails to do so, it turns into a normal form of dictatorship. Thus, one could conclude that if a fascist regime accepts a positive peace, it has ceased to exist.

      Is peace, therefore, just another area where we could define fascism as an essential anti-movement? Such a conclusion, however, would be too simple. Historian Roger Griffin convincingly argued that it would be misleading to understand fascism purely as an anti-movement. On the contrary, fascists seduced the masses by promoting the idea of the rebirth of the nation, coined by Griffin as a form of palingenetic ultra-nationalism. Fascists were not nihilists by nature but wanted to create a brighter, better future for the nation by leading it out of whatever crisis it currently faced, which, in turn, means manufacturing a crisis if none can be found.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      The Texas Crisis: Tilting at Windmills

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      Sometime last week, cold air escaped from the polar vortex, which usually stays high above the north pole. That icy air then traveled down to wreak havoc across Texas, a state geographically larger than France, bordering Mexico. Its nearly 30 million inhabitants are just starting to realize the scope of the epic infrastructural failure that has led to the entire state being declared a disaster area.

      The freezing temperatures have affected power plants, offices, hospitals and homes, killing at least 30 people so far. Major metropolitan cities such as Houston, San Antonio, Dallas/Fort Worth and Austin are literally frozen. Personally, it was indeed unusual to message colleagues in Europe and Britain to cancel meetings, reporting that three inches of snow had caused power outages in a state known for its energy production. Having spent most of my adult life in New York City and Cambridge, Massachusetts, never would I have imagined my home state of Texas crumbling before my eyes from such a minuscule amount of snow.

      Texas: The End of Authentic America?

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      On the ground, people, including myself, have collected and melted snow to flush toilets. Some are resorting to more desperate measures. Those who do have water are being told by local officials to boil before usage. Almost everyone fears their pipes bursting and flooding their homes with freezing water, as has happened to many friends and colleagues. Like others, I have scavenged for wood to burn in our seldom-used fireplace. Fueling stations and grocery shelves have been left empty much like during the initial outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, and people are sheltering in place for the second time in a year.

      While some pundits have tried to frame this as a “once in a century event,” such claims begin to ring hollow after they become so frequently used. Scientists like Judah Cohen argue this is just the latest disaster from the on-going climate crisis.

      The Latest Disaster

      While snow is indeed rare in central and south Texas, in the northern, rural panhandle, snow is quite normal. Those small northern cities that are closer to Colorado than Mexico have been operating on one of the two national power grids and thus have largely been unaffected by the crisis. In the rest of energy-rich Texas, public utilities have been privatized over the decades, as state Republicans opted for the rest of Texas to operate its own power grid to avoid federal regulation.

      Former Texas governor and US secretary of energy, Rick Perry, claimed on Wednesday that “Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business.” One friend of mine, who coincidently works in the oil and gas industry, had to escape his cold, waterless house at midnight with his wife, toddler, and 13-day-old baby. He would certainly disagree with that callous statement.

      Embed from Getty Images

      On Sunday night, as temperatures dropped to a 30-year record low of -18˚C (0˚F), demand for energy rose, the power grid collapsed because of a lack of weather preparedness, causing widespread outages. These outages caused local water systems to freeze not just because of the cold weather, but due to a lack of electricity to pump the water, leaving nearly half the state without supply. The state then mandated rolling outages to regulate energy — with no clear idea of which communities are being prioritized, how energy is being triaged and when this will end.

      Texas Governor Greg Abbott has gone on Fox News to blame renewable energy sources — and to attack the proposed Green New Deal favored by progressives — for a crisis caused primarily by the failure of the state to follow national standards to prepare equipment for dangerous weather events. Falsely, Abbott has claimed: “Our wind and our solar got shut down, and they were collectively more than 10 percent of our power grid, and that thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power on a state-wide basis … It just shows that fossil fuel is necessary.”

      This was echoed by right-wing representatives like Dan Crenshaw. In truth, the crisis was mostly caused by a lack of regulations mandating equipment be prepared for extreme weather as federal guidelines suggest. It was further exacerbated by the fact that Republican lawmakers, in power for the past two decades, refused to participate in the national grid, which could have eased the strain on the state’s system — all to pad the profit margins of private energy companies.

      Of course, much colder places in the northern United States and Canada rely on renewable solar and wind energy that has been equipped for cold weather. After blowback showing that most of the failures originated with fossil fuel, gas and nuclear power plants that were not equipped for the weather, Abbott blamed the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which is led by Republicans he appointed. Meanwhile, right-wing Texas state Senator Ted Cruz left his constituents to fend for themselves as he headed toward Cancun, in Mexico, using Houston police resources to help him get to the airport.

      Tim Boyd, mayor of Colorado City, has resigned after posting on Facebook that “No one owes you [or] your family anything; nor is it the local government’s responsibility to support you during trying times like this! Sink or swim it’s your choice! The City and County, along with power providers or any other service owes you NOTHING! I’m sick and tired of people looking for a damn handout.” Boyd’s argument relies on the prominent Texas myth of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps. This individualist myth assumed that white settler colonialists did precisely that and survived the wilderness alone at the edge of the American frontier, so you should too. In fact, these settlers often relied upon not just each other but also generations of communal knowledge shared with them by Native Americans.

      Ensuring Survival

      Ensuring survival during disasters requires a collective approach. This is one of the reasons we humans live in societies — we can do more together than alone. This is something that the current COVID-19 crisis should have taught us. The solution is simple, yet enormous: we must modernize all our systems —health, education and infrastructure. We need to make all utility companies — gas, electric, water, internet, cable, and phones — public. We must not prioritize customers but, rather, people.

      Texas is having a rude awakening because of decades of conservative policies that have prioritized private companies and rejected federal regulations that would have made the current crisis more manageable, if not altogether avoidable. Texas, the epitome of right-wing experimentation, has become a failed experiment overnight. Resolving this issue will be complicated because of continued climate change denial and the rejection of facts by right-wing politicians and their cult.

      In Miguel de Cervantes’ classic novel, “Don Quixote,” the fictional errant knight attacks what he perceives to be giants, despite being warned by his squire, Sancho Panza, that they are simply windmills. After Quixote’s failed attack on the windmills, Cervantes writes that “the knight was unable to move, so great was the shock with which he and [his horse] had hit the ground.” With their own attack on wind turbines, Texas Republicans have begun charging at windmills, blaming a small renewable energy sector instead of the destructive policies that created this deadly disaster.

      Hopefully, like Don Quixote, who eventually recognizes his madness, the Republican Party will acknowledge its own delusions. Imagining these windmills as socialist giants coming for individual rights will leave us “very much battered indeed,” as Cervantes describes his delusional character who, too, tilted at windmills.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      What Happened to the Emerging Democratic Majority?

      by

      In November of last year, Donald Trump lost the presidential election with the highest number of votes for a Republican candidate ever and the second-highest for a presidential candidate. Only Joe Biden did better. Trump also managed to garner the second-highest share of the non-white vote, 26%. Only George W. Bush outdid him, winning 28% in 2004, as a number of commentaries, seeking to diminish Trump’s feat, have pointed out. What they fail to acknowledge, however, is the fact that the two candidates were very different. Bush had many flaws, but race-baiting was not among them.

      Against that, by the time of the 2020 election, there was a wealth of evidence that “racial revanchism” was central to President Trump’s political agenda. This, however, did not prevent a significant number of minority voters from casting their ballots for him. Whether or not this made a difference is an interesting question. In some cases, it might have, most notably in Texas.

      Trumpism After Trump: The Wrong Person at the Right Time?

      READ MORE

      To be sure, Biden won the vast majority of the Hispanic vote in the big cities like Dallas, San Antonio and Austin. Trump, however, did surprisingly well in the heavily Latino counties in southern Texas along the Rio Grande border with Mexico. In Starr county, for instance, which is almost completely Hispanic, Trump gained more than 55% of the vote compared to 2016. These results, as neutral observers have charged, “ended up helping to dash any hopes Democrats had of taking Texas.”

      High Hopes

      Ahead of the election, Democrats had high hopes that this time, the emerging Democratic majority was finally going to materialize. The notion goes back to the title of a book from 2002, written by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira. In it, the authors argued that the future belonged to the Democrats, for a number of reasons. There was the transformation of America’s demography, there were secular ideological changes going in a progressive direction, and there was, last but not least, the growing socioeconomic and sociocultural dominance of large metropolitan areas, rooted in the growth of a postindustrial economy — what Teixeira called “ideopolises,” organized around ideas and services.  

      The idea was that the Democrats were in a better position than the Republicans to appeal to the diverse constituencies emerging from these developments: on the one hand, the growing ranks of professionals in the high-tech, finance, education, law and medical sectors, a growing number of them women; on the other, ancillary services, such as sales clerks, waiters, janitors, security personnel and teachers’ aides, a large number of them Hispanics and African Americans. Together, Teixeira suggested, they “formed powerful coalitions that now dominate the politics of many ideopolises united in their support of a politics of “tolerance and openness.”

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      In the meantime, much ink has been spilled over the crucial socioeconomic and sociocultural importance of metropolitan areas, largely confirming Teixeira’s assessment. Today’s “global cities” such as New York, London, Paris and Tokyo generate a significant part of their respective nation’s wealth. At the same time, however, they also represent quasi self-contained entities increasingly disconnected from the rest of the country.

      This is a problem, for in the process, the hinterland, which at one time played a crucial role as a supplier of myriads of inputs from small and medium-sized companies, has largely become structurally irrelevant to the metropolitan economy. With it went the middle-class labor force that was the backbone of what once was known as America’s heartland but is today disparaged as flyover country, its inhabitants dismissed as deplorable and repellent racist, sexist, homophobic ignoramuses. Proof: Why else would they have voted for somebody like Trump?

      After roughly two decades since the book was published, the emerging Democratic majority has still not fully materialized. Instead, what we have got are two antagonistic political tribes whose seemingly irreconcilable differences have polarized American politics along a wide range of fault lines: views on immigration, reproductive choice, gender, Black Lives Matter, gun control, affordable health care, social security — the list goes on. This divide’s grand signifier in today’s politics is Donald Trump. As unbelievable as it might sound — given he lost the election, given he was impeached twice, given he left the office scorned and disgraced — his legacy continues to haunt post-Trump politics and is likely to do so for the foreseeable future.

      Not Fade Away

      According to a recent representative survey, around 80% of Republicans continue to have a favorable view of Donald Trump; more than 70% believe that the charge that the former president incited the assault on the US Capitol on January 6 is untrue; and almost two-thirds believe there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election. It fits that according to the most recent Quinnipiac poll, conducted after Trump’s acquittal in the Senate, three-quarters of Republican respondents said they wished Trump would continue to play a “big role” in the GOP. So much for those who think Trump will somehow fade away into oblivion.

      Trump won in 2016 because he quite skillfully managed to articulate, appeal and respond to a range of diffuse popular grievances, accorded them legitimacy and, in the process, gave the impression that he listened and not only understood, but empathized with them — reminiscent of Bill Clinton’s well-known “I feel your pain” from 1992.  Even if Trump should miraculously disappear from the American political scene, Trumpism, as The Washington Post’s conservative commentator Gary Abernathy has recently maintained, “Trumpism is the GOP’s future.” If this indeed should be the case, it means that the chances for the emergence of a Democratic majority are likely to be as bleak as they have been over the past two decades.

      The notion of an emerging Democratic majority is premised on the idea that certain groups in society, most notably the highly educated, visible minorities, women and sexual minorities, qua their subordinate socioeconomic and sociocultural position have a “natural” affinity for a certain type of politics. Any deviation is either seen as a result of “false consciousness,” a failure “to get with the program” or, worse, simple betrayal of the cause, as the singer Madonna charged in 2016. A case in point was Barak Obama’s attack on Hispanics who voted for the incumbent in 2020, accusing them of ignoring Trump’s track record of race-baiting.  

      America Is No Longer One Nation

      READ MORE

      The same applies to all the white women who voted for Trump, despite his record of routinely disparaging and denigrating women. As Sarah Jaffe has put it in an article for the New Labor Forum, no single fact about the 2016 election was “more confounding than the fact that Trump’s margin of victory included a slim majority of white women voters.” Things were even worse in 2020. While Trump lost some support among white men, his support among white women remained virtually unchanged.

      Political parties, particularly in two-party systems such as the United States, have to assemble a coalition of disparate groups. A case in point was the Democratic Party, which for a long time managed to hold together two factions, one from the South and the other from the Northeast, that were fundamentally at loggerheads over major issues such as civil rights. Behind the idea of the emerging Democratic majority is the expectation that it is possible to put together a coalition on the basis of shared values and shared aspirations, derived from shared experiences of a lack of recognition, if not outright discrimination.

      Radical Nostalgia

      Twenty years ago, this was a reasonable expectation, given the direction of social, and particularly demographic, change. The populist surge that has swept over the United States during the past decade or so, however, has fundamentally altered the logic of electoral choice. Populist mobilization derives its logic not from shared values and aspirations, but from disparate grievances and the perceived unresponsiveness of the political establishment to these grievances.

      Successful populist protagonists are not successful because they come up with elaborate blueprints for profound socioeconomic change, but because they absorb and reflect myriads of disparate grievances and give them a voice. More often than not, populist politics are not about the future but a glorified past, reflecting the surge of nostalgia that has become a hallmark of the current age, further enhanced and intensified by COVID-19.

      There is nothing wrong with nostalgia. In fact, new studies show that nostalgia can be a beneficial mechanism helpful to coping with a difficult situation. It becomes dangerous, however, when it provokes an aggressive response. This, it seems, is what has happened in recent years among parts of the American public — or, at least, that is what the recent survey mentioned earlier suggests. In response to the statement that “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it,” more than a third of respondents agreed either completely (11%) or somewhat (25%).

      Embed from Getty Images

      In light of the events of January 6, this is quite alarming. But it jibes with the findings of a recent study of MAGA supporters, who to a significant extent consist of white Christian males beyond retirement age. Full of resentment toward assertive women no longer willing to take shit from men, African Americans seen as not trying hard enough and immigrants accused of changing American culture for the worse, they epitomize this kind of radical political nostalgia.

      Nostalgia in terms of a yearning for the status quo ante might to a certain extent explain why a majority of white women voted for Trump. More often than not, grievances stem from changes that individuals perceive as having been imposed on them. A classic case is the construction of nuclear power plants, which in the past gave rise to massive popular resistance and contributed to the rise of Green parties. In the current situation in the United States, grievances stem to a significant extent from both demographic change and the increased visibility of minorities who refuse to remain silent.

      When white women voted for Donald Trump, it was because what has been happening over the past years is a fundamental challenge to the existing racial hierarchy that had been taken for granted. A vote for Trump was a vote for maintaining a tenuous status quo, where white women might be second-class with respect to gender but first-class with respect to race. The same logic certainly does not apply to black voters supporting Trump, a majority of whom were black men. It also does not apply to Hispanics, whose diverse background (Mexican, Cuban, Central American, etc.) makes it even more difficult to come up with a common denominator. Religious considerations, particularly with respect to reproductive choice and gender issues, certainly played a significant role, as did the perception that neither party cares about their concerns.

      What has been emerging over the past decades is a new constellation of political contest, pitting substance-based politics grounded in reasoned deliberation and values, however flawed, against grievance-based politics fueled by anger and resentment. This is hardly confined to the United States. Western Europe has been struggling with this phenomenon and its fallout for decades. Yet given its peculiar system, the United States is in a unique position to serve as a laboratory to see how these dynamics play themselves out. One might wish that the vision behind the notion of the emerging Democratic majority will ultimately carry the day.

      Nietzschean skepticism informed by the notion of “human, all too human” calls for caution. Trump might be finished politically. His spirit, however, is alive and well, capable of causing mischief to no end. Trump’s recent full-front attack on Mitch McConnell is a foretaste of things to come. It portends an attempt to completely transform the GOP into a radical right-wing populist party, devoid of any kind of real substance — in other words, a replica writ large of the Great Leader.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      The Storming of the US Capitol Through Identitarian Eyes

      by

      As history unfolded before those refreshing their Twitter feeds and watching live TV, attempts to define the storming of the US Capitol in Washington, DC, immediately emerged, including those by the radical right. Among the various radical-right voices that tried to frame the event, evaluations going beyond, for example, the clownish (though not undangerous) stories of QAnon activists offer insights into the workings of more complex radical-right ideological programs, including glimpses of imagined futures. Following the media-savvy Martin Sellner during a few days of digital activism, from Wednesday, January 6, to Sunday, January 10, illustrates how one of the main proponents of the Identitarian Movement makes sense of and utilizes the insurrection, and highlights the concerns and hopes he connects to the event.

      How QAnon Followers Saw the US Inauguration

      READ MORE

      Sellner is, of course, a leading figure in the “movement” (and still head of the Austrian branch), contributes to, for example, the main German new-right periodical, is a prolific producer of digital content and a man who, having been in contact with the Christchurch terrorist, has been banned from major social media platforms and now disseminates opinions via Telegram (about 58k subscribers) and BitChute (about 17k subscribers). Sellner began commenting on the event on Telegram in the early evening (CET) of January 6 and, over the next few days, offered discussions with fellow members of the radical right and commentary. (The following quotations are taken from Sellner’s Telegram channel, a column he wrote and various recordings that are available through his BitChute channel).

      Not a Coup

      In a column published the day after the storming that Sellner describes the event not as “a historical, but a hysterical moment,” a “chaotic, planless happening,” an act of “political masturbation and discharge of emotional urges” — not a “coup d’etat,” an “armed uprising” or a “terrorist attack.” This latter part is connected to accusations against the “mainstream press” and its alleged double standard, including in relation to the Black Lives Matter movement (the “Madness of Black Lives Matter”). According to Sellner, the latter aims for the destruction of property and lives, while the events of January 6 were a “mostly peaceful protest.” Indeed, referring explicitly to Guy Debord’s “The Society of the Spectacle,” a book he has long drawn on, Sellner regularly speaks of the power of the media to define reality and truth, and the weaponization of the event against “patriots.”

      While such condemnation of the so-called “lying press” is hardly new, Sellner also criticizes the unfolding of the protest itself. Here, he mourns a lack of planning and leadership and, unsurprisingly, calls for an “activism elite” that can channel the idealism of these “patriots.” Referring also to QAnon, he calls for overcoming conspiracy theories that have prevented “patriots” from assessing the situation realistically and taking responsibility in their own hands. Fully in line with his metapolitical orientation, Sellner proclaims that there is no “silver bullet” but a need to fight for hegemony.

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      This points to alternative forms of protest, and he repeatedly raises the idea of a (“symbolic”) “siege.”  That is, Sellner envisages an alternative January 6 that would have not ended in a counterproductive storming of the Capitol, but in a sustained demonstration of strength via a “protest camp” in Washington to influence the political system.

      Celebrating powerful imagery of protesters on the stairs of the Capitol, the course the event took thus appears as a missed opportunity to “awaken the people” and to put the elite in its place. Indeed, one type of victim present in Sellner’s narrativization is a rather broad group of “patriots,” of those who lack a voice, those who are “economically marginalized” and who have no political representation. Ultimately, this covers all those suffering from the establishment, the “disenfranchised, delegitimized people who are not allowed a chance … the indigenous, the Europeans, we are not given a chance, everything is taken away from us, one wants to annihilate us, one wants to destroy us, one wants to, entirely openly with an announced revolution remove us from history.”

      The apparent need to rescue the ethnic collective from an unbound “left-liberal-globalistic ideology” is also visible in another recording as it is this ideology that supposedly results in the “destruction of organically-grown communities, destruction of nation-states.”

      The Old Is Crumbling

      Another type of victim includes particular individuals, from Ashli Babbitt, who was shot during the riot (not forgetting to mention that she was shot by a “black policeman”), to the radical-right activist Nick Fuentes and Donald Trump for being banned from social media. The former president’s future is repeatedly thematized, noting that Trump has seemingly given in (at least in his fight over the election), though acknowledging that this might simply be an act of self-preservation. While Sellner initially speculated that Trump could reveal “dirty background secrets of the globalists” during his last days in office, the imagined threat posed by the enemy is stark: they “really want to completely finish him off … [and beat him] to the rocks like Prometheus: whoever dares to stand up against the globalists will be finished off.”

      Ultimately, he assumes that that revelations are unlikely to happen as Trump loves his life and fortune. As this “total digital annihilation” unfolds, Sellner regularly comments on Big Tech, speaking, for example, of Silicon Valley as the “glowing city of the hill … they are really the masters of the planet, if they want.”

      Such an ending would leave little hope for the radical right, but like every good attempt to forge and mobilize, hope is presented too. Sellner reports of a “civil war” within major tech companies and claims that 2021 could see “vital progress in the area of alt-tech,” the financing of their “own platform,” possibly even their own “fin-tech structure.” This hope goes hand in hand with what he calls a “repression-accelerationism” and the claim that “we have to go through a time of suffering.” With no way back, Sellner calls for a renewed struggle for hegemony and, citing the poet Friedrich Schiller, proclaims early on, “The old is crumbling down — the times are changing — And from the ruins blooms a fairer life.” As these lines are typed, it remains unclear what future will emerge from the storming of the Capitol and, thus, what fairness will blossom.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in World Politics

      Trumpism After Trump: The Wrong Person at the Right Time?

      by

      A few days before the Senate was due to vote on whether to proceed with the second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump on charges of inciting insurrection, an article in The Washington Post’s opinion pages boldly proclaimed that “Trumpism is American fascism.” Equating the Trump phenomenon with fascism is nothing new. The comparison started with his election in 2016, feeding a cottage industry over the next four years. At the time, most academic experts on fascism vehemently disagreed. In August 2020, for instance, a prominent Georgetown University historian raised the rhetorical question, “How fascist is President Trump?” The response followed, stante pede: “Not that much.”

      The arguably most important reason for dismissing the fascist charge was that scholars of fascism did not want to contribute to what Gavriel D. Rosenfeld has called “symbolic inflation” — the fact that invoking Adolf Hitler has led to a process where the “value of ‘Hitler’ as an admonitory signifier has become progressively devalued over time.” Examples abound. Jörg Haider, for instance, the leader of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) who propelled it to international prominence in the 1990s, was routinely associated with Hitler.

      How Do You Tell an Authoritarian From a Fascist These Days?

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      It was only in the aftermath of the assault on the US Capitol that one of the most eminent contemporary scholars of fascism, Columbia University historian Robert Paxton, came out to state that “Trump’s incitement of the invasion of the Capitol … removes my objection to the fascist label. His open encouragement of civic violence to overturn an election crosses a red line. The label now seems not just acceptable but necessary.”

      A Diagnosis of Decline

      Behind this reassessment of Trump(ism) is the fact that those who invaded the Capitol on January 6 had no qualms about engaging in violent actions. In fact, by now, it has become obvious that many of the insurgents considered violence a perfectly acceptable means to advance their agenda. The Proud Boys — recently labeled a neo-fascist terrorist group by the Canadian government — add a whiff of squadrismo to the mix. The squadristi (this picture is taken at the Foro Italico, a piazza in front of the Olympic stadium in Rome, depicting an armed squad heading out for a punitive expedition) were Benito Mussolini’s armed goons routinely swarming out to the countryside where they terrorized socialists and trade union leaders.

      Squadrismo was informed by a “palingenetic vision of politics” that was also at the heart of Mussolini’s version of totalitarianism. The term was originally coined and developed by Roger Griffin, another leading expert on fascism. Griffin defines fascism as a palingenetic form of populist ultranationalism, where “palingenetic” refers to the myth of rebirth, revival and regeneration provoked by a profound sense of decline, decay and decadence. It follows that fascism is revolutionary and, thus, by definition, the opposite of conservatism. The last thing fascists are interested in is defending and preserving the status quo.

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      From this perspective, there can be no doubt that Trumpism has certain affinities to fascism, to put it cautiously. The very slogan that informed Trump’s 2016 campaign, “Make America Great Again,” reflects the palingenetic spirit of fascism. It serves both as a diagnosis and a promise. A year ago, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat gave a sense of how the diagnosis might go. In his view, the United States, if not the whole Western world, suffers from decadence, manifested by “forms of economic stagnation, institutional sclerosis, and cultural repetition at a high stage of wealth and technological proficiency and civilizational development.”

      There undoubtedly is much truth to this diagnosis. In fact, a Pew survey from early 2019 revealed that a significant majority of the American public shared this view. When asked about their expectations 30 years into the future, a majority thought that the United States would lose importance on the world stage; that the country would be saddled with a huge national debt; and that socioeconomic inequality would be even higher than at the moment. At the same time, the vast majority of respondents had little confidence in the capability of the country’s elected officials to meet these challenges. In fact, more than half of respondents thought that “Washington” had a “negative impact” on finding solutions to the country’s major problems.

      Various studies from 2020 provide further confirmation of the perception of decline. A Brookings Institution preview of the results of the 2020 Census, for instance, painted a picture of stagnation, both in terms of population growth and mobility. A U.S.News analysis of the most recent findings of its annual country rankings found widespread skepticism that more than three years of Trump had made the country “great again.” In fact, compared to the previous year, more Americans thought the US was corrupt: at 31%, a 5% increase on 2019. At the same time, the number of Americans who thought their country was “trustworthy” declined from 61% in 2019 to 55% in 2020.

      Finally, according to a Pew study from early 2020, most American Christians have come to believe that their religion has lost, and continues to lose, influence in American life. Worse still, most also believe that there is a fundamental “tension between their beliefs and the mainstream culture.” This is particularly galling given the fact that at one time in the not-so-distant past, Christian culture was mainstream culture. Not for nothing, in 2016 and 2020, (white) evangelicals voted overwhelmingly for Trump.

      Something Like Fascism

      Diagnosis, however, is relatively easy. Coming up with a genuine remedy is a fundamentally different issue, provided it goes beyond trite platitudes couched in catchy sloganeering epitomized by Trump’s MAGA campaign. “Make America Great Again” is one of these slogans that sound good but are fundamentally meaningless in the true sense of the word. As such, it is part of the new type of “simulative politics” characteristic of contemporary Western-style democracy, a politics staged as an organized spectacle, the “embodiment of a reality style of politics,” as Douthat puts it, by a president who was “performing a drama that doesn’t necessarily have strong correlates in the real world.” All of this makes Trump a “cartoonish imitation of something like fascism,” a “weird, internet-enabled simulacrum of fascism.”

      The carnivalesque mise en scène of the storming of the Capitol — a pastiche of the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, itself a symbolic act given there were only seven prisoners held in the fortress — lends some credence to Douthat’s interpretation. Exemplary here is the “almost-farcical” case of “Elizabeth from Knoxville” who thought she would take part in a revolution only to get Maced (and complain bitterly about it). The farce, of course, goes only so far, given the very real violence resulting in material destruction and the loss of life. It is at this point that the simulacrum turns into reality, exposing the potential of genuine fascism hiding behind the ludicrousness and absurdity of the last days of Trump.

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      Trumps’ departure has not diminished the potential. Quite the contrary: His ignominious exit has added new fuel to the anger and resentment among many Americans that propelled Trump to the presidency in the first place and has done nothing to assuage diffuse political disenchantment or weaken latent authoritarian inclinations. In fact, an authoritative empirical study from June 2020 found a “substantial minority” of Americans being open to “authoritarian alternatives.” In late 2019, around a quarter of US survey respondents expressed support for a strong leader “who doesn’t have to bother with Congress or elections.” Overall, it concluded that between a “quarter and a third of the American public flirt with the idea that an alternative to democracy would be a good thing.”

      The study does not disaggregate the results along color lines. It stands to reason, however, that a majority of those yearning for a strong leader are white voters, the very same voters who constituted the bulk of Trump’s loyal supporters. White Americans have always considered themselves the only true embodiment of the nation, rooted in a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant heritage, which was only gradually extended to Europeans of other Christian faiths. In fact, for much of the 19th century, Catholic immigrants from Ireland, Germany and Italy were considered less white than Americans of Anglo-Saxon stock and, as a result, subject to discrimination.

      Over the past several years, the universe of white American identity and pride has come crashing down. For one, as numerous projections have pointed out, by 2045, white Americans will have become a minority in what they see as “their own country.” The result has been both growing white “racial anxiety” and the beginnings of a sociocultural and sociopolitical backlash against the rise of visible minorities, reflected in the support and vote for Trump. Secondly, there is the seemingly inexorable decline of Christianity’s influence in American society. Over the past few decades, American Christians, and particularly white American Christians, have progressively lost their “cultural dominance” and, with it, the assumption, as the editor of a prominent Christian news outlet put it, “that people are like us and people understand us, and people accept us.”

      Finally, there is the notion that the United States is the greatest country in the world and, therefore, predestined and entitled to assume the leadership of the Western world. This was certainly true in the postwar period, given the essential threat posed by the Soviet Union. Today, it is a rather iffy proposition, as the skepticism of a majority of the American public about the country’s position in the world clearly shows.

      The Trump years have severely tarnished the American image among the country’s key allies. The trade war with China exposed American weaknesses in the face of a new challenge to its supremacy. The pandemic, and particularly the way it was handled, only made things worse. In late 2020, a mere quarter of the German population and around a third of the French had a favorable view of the United States. In the UK, traditionally America’s closest ally in Europe, only around 40% saw the US in a favorable light.

      Fertile Ground

      If there has ever been fertile ground in the United States for the kind of palingenetic form of populist ultranationalism Griffin has identified as the core of fascism, it is now. Fertile ground, however, is not enough. It takes the right enabler to translate the mixture of anxiety, resentment, political disenchantment, the flirting with authoritarian alternatives and the yearning for revival and the reestablishment of the “natural order” into political action. Trump might have appealed to some of these sentiments. However, in the end, the combination of egocentric narcissism and mental slothfulness assured that he would never amount to more than a cheap pastiche of the likes of Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi.

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      This is not to say that Trump was nothing but a fleeting moment in contemporary American politics. Quite the opposite. Trump might have been the wrong person at the right time. His impact, however, is enduring. It is reflected most prominently in the direction large parts of the Republican Party have taken. Whereas in the not-so-distant past Republicans championed various culture-war causes, from opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage to the promotion of school prayers, today, a large number of Republican officials on the federal, state and local levels have adopted positions that lean in the direction of Trump-style subversion of the American democratic system. As Chris Hayes has recently put it in the pages of The Atlantic, the fight these days between Democrats and Republicans is less about policy, where under the impact of COVID-19 “the gaps are narrowing. It’s about whether the United States will live up to the promise of democracy — and on that crucial question, we’ve rarely been so divided.”

      Even after the shock of January 6, Republican officials continue to feed into the politics of anger and resentment that was at the heart of the assault on Congress. Yesterday, as the Senate voted to proceed with Trump’s impeachment 56-44, just six Republicans joined their Democratic colleagues in the move to condemn the president’s role in inciting an unprecedented domestic assault on American democracy. With 17 Republican votes needed to impeach Donald Trump, a reckoning is unlikely.

      The temptation to harvest white resentment for individual gain is too strong and, with it, the temptation to follow the lure of some form of post-fascist fascism, American-style. In 1935, Sinclair Lewis published a novel with the provocative title, “It Can’t Happen Here.” Lewis, of course, thought fascism was a possibility, even in the United States. It might be a good idea to give his book a second look.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More