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    Racism rebranded: how far-right ideology feeds off identity politics

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    Racism rebranded: how far-right ideology feeds off identity politics In an extract from his new book, the Observer columnist describes how substituting ethnic superiority with ‘cultural difference’ has allowed traditional racism to seep back into the mainstream. How can we get out of the box of racial thinking?‘The Negro is not. Any more than the white man.” So wrote Frantz Fanon, the Martinique-born revolutionary and intellectual, in his 1952 masterpiece, Black Skin, White Masks. He was making an argument about the illusory character of racial categorisation. And, yet, more than 70 years after Fanon wrote those lines, they still feel unsettling, as if they are a challenge not just to racialisation but also to our identity, our very being. That they should do so exposes the deeply conflicted relationship we still possess with race.We live in an age in which in most societies there is a moral abhorrence of racism, albeit that in most, bigotry and discrimination still disfigure the lives of many. We also live in an age saturated with identitarian thinking and obsessed with placing people into racial boxes. The more we despise racial thinking, the more we seem to cling to it.This paradox is at the heart of my new book. Not So Black and White is a retelling of the history both of the idea of race and of the struggles to confront racism and to transcend racial categorisation, a retelling that challenges many of the ways in which we think both of race and of antiracism.Most people assume that racism emerges when members of one race begin discriminating against members of another. In fact, the opposite is the case: intellectuals and elites began dividing the world into distinct races to explain and justify the differential treatment of certain peoples. The ancestors of today’s African Americans were not enslaved because they were black. They were deemed to be racially distinct, as black people, to justify their enslavement.We think of race today primarily in terms of skin colour. But that was not how 19th-century thinkers imagined race. It was, for them, a description of social inequality, not just of skin colour. It may be difficult to comprehend now, but 19th-century thinkers looked upon the working class as a distinct racial group in much the same way as many now view black people as racially dissimilar to white people. Only in the 20th century, as the working class was drawn into the democratic process, and as the new imperialism redrew the “colour line”, did the contemporary understanding of race emerge.Many today imagine, too, that identity politics is a new phenomenon, and one that is associated with the left. I show that its origins lie, in fact, on the reactionary right and its primary expression, long before it was called “identity politics”, was in the concept of race, the belief that one’s being – one’s identity – determined one’s moral and social place in the world.If much of the history of race has been obscured, so, too, has much of the history of the challenge to racism. Until recently, those confronting inequality and oppression did so in the name not of particular identities but of a universalism that fuelled the great radical movements that have shaped the modern world, from anticolonial struggles to campaigns for women’s suffrage.These struggles expanded the meaning of equality and universality. There has developed in recent years an impassioned debate about the Enlightenment, which both supporters and critics present as a peculiarly European phenomenon. For the one, it is a demonstration of the greatness of Europe; for the other, a reminder that its ideals are tainted by racism and colonialism. Both miss the importance of the non-European world in shaping many of the ideas we associate with the Enlightenment. It was through the struggles of those denied equality and liberty by the elites in Europe and America that ideas of universalism were invested with meaning. It is the demise of that radical universalist tradition that has shaped the emergence of contemporary identity politics.There have always been identitarian strands among antiracists, from 19th-century “Back to Africa” movements to Négritude in the 20th century. Only in the postwar world, however, have they come to dominate and to be seen as progressive. The reasons lie in a myriad of social and political developments, from the erosion of class politics, to the emergence of culture as the primary lens through which to understand social differences, to the growth of social pessimism, that have helped marginalise the universalist perspective.ProfileKenan MalikShowKenan Malik is a writer, lecturer and Observer columnist. His previous books include The Quest for a Moral Compass and From Fatwa to Jihad, which was shortlisted for the Orwell prize.The embrace of identity politics by the left has ironically opened the door for the reactionary right to reclaim its original inheritance, allowing racism to be rebranded as white identity politics. We have come full circle: the politics of identity that began as reactionary claims about a racial hierarchy has been regrasped by the reactionary right in the name of cultural difference.The following edited extract from my new book shows how the far right remade itself in the postwar world and how it has exploited the language of identity to pursue its aims. It shows, too, how mainstream conservatives have allowed far-right tropes to seep into our culture.As reactionary organisations, which had enjoyed the limelight in the prewar years, were pushed into the shadows in the post-Holocaust world, many on the far right were forced to rethink their views of race, identity and difference. Alain de Benoist became a key figure in this rethinking, the founder of the Nouvelle Droite in France, and a philosophical mentor of the contemporary far right.Benoist cut his political teeth within the traditional fascist milieu, most notably through the far-right opposition to Algerian independence. In the 1960s, after the French defeat in Algeria, he recognised the need to move beyond discredited arguments rooted in biological racism, and to engage in a cultural war to reclaim intellectual ground. In 1968, Benoist helped found GRECE, the Research and Study Group for European Civilisation, a thinktank to school the far right.The Nouvelle Droite drew in part from traditional themes and sources. It proclaimed its hostility to the Enlightenment, modernity, equality, democracy and liberalism, and insisted on the importance of tradition and hierarchy. It found sustenance in the French reactionary tradition from Joseph de Maistre to Charles Maurras, and from German rightwing thinkers, especially the interwar “conservative revolutionaries”, such as Ernst Jünger and Carl Schmitt.It drew, too, upon a very different tradition: that of the New Left that emerged in the late 1950s. From the New Left, the French New Right borrowed arguments about the significance of culture, its hostility to globalisation, its anti-Americanism and its embrace of the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci. Benoist took from Gramsci the belief that conquest of power comes only after conquest of culture. Liberalism was so entrenched that its values survived irrespective of who was in power. Anti-liberals, Benoist argued, had to fight battles not on the streets but in people’s minds, at the level of ideas, and of “metapolitics”. This he called the tactic of “rightwing Gramscianism”.At the heart of Benoist’s philosophy was the abandonment of racial superiority in favour of cultural difference, and the reworking of the relationship between community, identity and diversity. “The true wealth of the world”, he insisted, “is first and foremost the diversity of its cultures and peoples.” It is in being different that a people finds its meaning and identity, both of which are drawn, indeed in certain senses are inseparable, from its culture and heritage. “Different cultures provide different responses to essential questions”; hence “all attempts to unify them end up destroying them”. It was a völkisch vision: “Everyone inherits a ‘constituent community’ which precedes him and which will constitute the root of his values and norms.” The individual “discovers his goals rather than choosing them”, and builds his identity through that discovery. So, “to find out who I am, I first have to know where I am”.Such “ethnopluralism” seemed not to possess the taint of biological racism; but by fixing cultures to specific geographic locations and by insisting that to belong to a culture one had to be descended from the original inhabitants of that location, the Nouvelle Droite found in “culture” the synonym for “race”; a find later borrowed by many conservatives and “postliberals”.Immigrants, Benoist insisted, must always remain outsiders because they were carriers of distinct cultures and histories, and so could never be absorbed into those of the host nation. Citizenship should be reserved for those who are “one of us”. Immigrants could – or, at least, should – never be citizens. Democracy only works where “demos and ethnos coincide”.“We are Generation Identity… We have stopped believing that Khader is our brother, the planet our village and humanity our family. We have discovered that we have roots and ancestors – and thus a future. Our only inheritance is our blood, our soil, and our identity… This is not a mere manifesto, it’s a declaration of war.”It was a declaration of war on a YouTube video. But for all its comically dramatic music and overheated rhetoric, the launch in 2012 of Génération Identitaire, or Generation Identity, marked an important point in the development of modern reactionary identitarianism. Ten years earlier, a group of French far-right activists, many linked to the Nouvelle Droite, had formed the Bloc Identitaire, which became the heart of a network of far-right identitarian groups and of which Génération Identitaire was the youth wing. The movement was banned by the French government in March 2021 for “incitement of discrimination, hatred and violence”. By then it had spawned a dozen other groups across Europe, and its influence had crossed the Atlantic, too.The Bloc Identitaire drew on the Nouvelle Droite for both individuals and themes. Its key leitmotifs are familiar: opposition to globalisation, defence of ethnopluralism and white identity, hostility to immigration and Islam. The Identitarians feared that demographic change would sweep away white Europeans. “The cradle”, writes Adriano Scianca, a leading figure in the Italian identitarian movement, is “the most powerful weapon” and when “the baby cots are empty, civilisation dies”, an echo of future US president Theodore Roosevelt’s claim at the end of the 19th century that “competition between the races” reduced itself “to the warfare of the cradle”. For late-19th-century white supremacists, the declining birth rate of Anglo-Saxons created the alarming possibility of the only “true white race” in America being overrun by “the immigrant European horde”. A century later, the fear is of Europeans being swamped by hordes from beyond the continent – and in particular by Islam.Gisèle Littman, an Egyptian-born Jewish woman who wrote under the name of Bat Ye’or (Hebrew for “Daughter of the Nile”), coined the term “Eurabia”. It described a grand conspiracy theory in which the EU, led by French elites, implemented a secret plan to sell Europe to Muslims in exchange for oil. Europe, Ye’or told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, “will become a political satellite of the Arab and Muslim world”. Europeans would be reduced to the condition of “dhimmitude” – the permanent status of second-class subjects of Islamic rule. The Israeli historian Robert Wistrich dismissed Ye’or’s fantasies as “the protocols of the elders of Brussels”. In the wake of 9/11, however, the fantasies took flight, and not just on the fringes of politics. The mainstream British writer Melanie Phillips has become an advocate of the “dhimmitude” thesis, as have influential figures such as Niall Ferguson and Bruce Bawer in the US.Generation Identity is no mass movement; membership of its various groups is tiny. Nevertheless, it has helped shape public debate, promoting an aggressive form of reactionary identitarianism that has percolated far beyond the far right. “Europe is committing suicide… by the end of the lifespans of most people currently alive, Europe will not be Europe and the peoples of Europe will have lost the only place in the world we had to call home.” That could be Alain de Benoist or Guillaume Faye or any number of Nouvelle Droite or Génération Identitaire polemicists. In fact, it is Douglas Murray, in the opening to his 2017 bestseller The Strange Death of Europe. Murray is a leading figure in British conservative circles, associate editor of the Spectator magazine and author of a string of popular books. He writes of “the replacement of large parts of the European populations by other people” and worries that “London has become a foreign country” because “in 23 of London’s 33 boroughs ‘white Britons’ are now in a minority”, again echoing Generation Identity.The main themes in Murray’s argument were steeped in traditional racial thinking. The term “race suicide” was coined in the late 19th century by the American sociologist Edward Ross, and popularised by Theodore Roosevelt, to express their fears that Anglo-Saxons were being out-bred by inferior immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. The white supremacist Theodore Lothrop Stoddard warned in the early 20th century that the white ancestral “homeland” of the Caucasus had become a “racially brown man’s land in which white blood survives only as vestigial traces of vanishing significance”. The same was happening in Europe, too. “What assurance”, he wondered, could there be “that the present world order may not swiftly and utterly pass away?” These ideas were for much of the postwar era pushed to the racist fringes. Sustained by the Nouvelle Droite and Génération Identitaire, these fringe arguments have now become appropriated by many strands of mainstream conservatism.The 2010s saw a series of books warning of Europe “committing suicide”, such as Thilo Sarrazin’s Germany Abolishes Itself and Éric Zemmour’s The French Suicide. Sarrazin, former SPD finance minister for the state of Berlin, and executive board member of Germany’s central bank, bemoaned the declining white population and the high level of immigrant fertility, the combination leading to Germany being both less intelligent, less moral and no longer Germany. For Zemmour, a television journalist who became a candidate in the 2022 presidential elections, Europe was committing “premeditated suicide”, the left having “betrayed the people in the name of minorities”.The “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, a staple of the far right, has also gained a foothold in mainstream conservatism. In 2011, the novelist and white nationalist conspiracy theorist Renaud Camus published Le Grand Remplacement in which he claimed that globalists had created the “replaceable human, without any national, ethnic or cultural specificity”, allowing “the replacing elites” to swap white Europeans for non-Europeans. He described non-Europeans in Europe as “colonists”, the “replacing elites” as “collaborationists”, and the process of replacement as “genocide by substitution”. Camus dedicated his book to the two “prophets” that had shaped his thinking, the British anti-immigration politician Enoch Powell and the French writer Jean Raspail, whose 1973 dystopian novel The Camp of the Saints tells of a fleet of immigrants from India overwhelming France, and its white population, and has become a cult hit for identitarians across the globe.In Britain, too, similar fears have become part of the conservative conversation. Like Douglas Murray, the London-based American novelist Lionel Shriver fears the de-whitening of London and projects her version of replacement theory. “The lineages of white Britons in their homeland commonly go back hundreds of years,” she writes, and yet they have to “submissively accept” the “ethnic transformation” of the UK “without a peep of protest”. Westerners, she adds, are being forced “to passively accept and even abet incursions by foreigners so massive that the native-born are effectively surrendering their territory without a shot fired”. The distinguished economist Paul Collier is another figure apprehensive about “the indigenous British” becoming “a minority in their own capital”. Political scientist Eric Kaufmann thinks it legitimate to promote white “racial self-interest” and to use such racial self-interest to limit immigration, so that in a majority white country, immigrants should be mainly white to enable “assimilation”.Identitarian arguments have become even more entrenched on the other side of the Atlantic, from the far right to mainstream Republicanism. The white nationalist and neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, who claims to have invented the term “alt-right”, replays many of the themes of reactionary identitarianism: white people as victims of cultural “dispossession”, immigration as a “proxy war” against white people. He advocates “peaceful ethnic cleansing” and the creation of “an ethno-state that would be a gathering point of all Europeans”, one “based on very different ideals than… the Declaration of Independence”.The presidential victory of Donald Trump in 2016 provided new opportunities, as alt-right identitarians such Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon entered the White House. Even before the Trump ascendancy, conservatives were humming to many of the European refrains. In the question at the heart of Christopher Caldwell’s 2009 book, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe – “Can Europe be the same with different people in it?” – is embedded the idea that Europe was made by a particular group of people and that immigrants – different people – would undo it. He echoes, too, the claim that migration is a form of “colonisation” and that migrants come to “supplant” European culture. Caldwell hails Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints as capturing “the complexity of the modern world”.After 2016, the Great Replacement theory became commonplace in Republican circles. “We can’t restore our civilisation with somebody else’s babies”, Iowa congressman Steve King tweeted. Fox News’ Tucker Carlson has constantly charged the Democrats with trying “to change the racial mix of the country… a policy [that] is called ‘the great replacement’, the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from faraway countries”. Polls show that one-third of Americans and nearly two-thirds of Trump supporters believe in the Great Replacement theory and that a secret cabal “is trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gains”.One of the ironies is that many of the conservatives who fret most about “white decline” are also among the most strident critics of identity politics. According to Douglas Murray, identity politics “atomises society into different interest groups”, and its “consequences… are deranged as well as dementing”. But not, apparently, when worrying that “Only 44.9% of London residents are now white British” or that Europeans are being driven out of their homeland. Taking part in a debate in defence of the proposition that “identity politics is tearing society apart”, Lionel Shriver argued that she had been a “fierce advocate” of the US civil rights movement because its goal was “to break down the artificial barriers between us” and “to release us into seeing each other not as black or white… but as individual people”. “The colour of my skin,” she added, “is an arbitrary accident” and “the boxes into which I have been born are confinements I have struggled to get out of and I would wish that liberation to everyone else.” Except, it seems, if you are a non-white immigrant. Then, the “arbitrary accident” of birth becomes an essential feature of one’s identity, the “artificial barriers between us” need to be recognised as insurmountable impediments to assimilation, the “confinements” of ethnic boxes maintained and people seen not as “individuals” but as “black or white”.The reactionary right – Nouvelle Droite, Generation Identity, the alt-right in America – uses the language of diversity and identity as a means of rebranding racism. Many on the mainstream right rehearse elements of this rebranding, even as they castigate the excesses of white nationalism. Murray “unequivocally” condemns the “racism exhibited by people pursuing white ethno-nationalism” while also giving a nod to the Great Replacement theory and to the importance of whiteness. It is occupying the grey zone in which one can claim attachment to the moral framework of postwar antiracism but also maintain the freedom to replay perniciously racist arguments, helping to normalise them.
    Not So Black and White by Kenan Malik is published by Hurst (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
    TopicsRaceThe ObserverThe far rightPolitics booksHistory booksSociety booksUS politicsextractsReuse this content More

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      The big idea: are we really so polarised? | Dominic Packer and Jay Van Bavel

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      The big idea: are we really so polarised? In many democracies the political chasm seems wider than ever. But emotion, not policies, may be what actually divides us In 2020, the match-making website OkCupid asked 5 million hopeful daters around the world: “Could you date someone who has strong political opinions that are the opposite of yours?” Sixty per cent said no, up from 53% a year before.Scholars used to worry that societies might not be polarised enough. Without clear differences between political parties, they thought, citizens lack choices, and important issues don’t get deeply debated. Now this notion seems rather quaint as countries have fractured along political lines, reflected in everything from dating preferences to where people choose to live.Sign up to our Inside Saturday newsletter for an exclusive behind the scenes look at the making of the magazine’s biggest features, as well as a curated list of our weekly highlights.Just how stark has political polarisation become? Well, it depends on where you live and how you look at it. When social psychologists study relations between groups, they often find that whereas people like their own groups a great deal, they have fairly neutral feelings towards out-groups: “They’re fine, but we’re great!” This pattern used to describe relations between Democrats and Republicans in the US. In 1980, partisans reported feeling warm towards members of their own party and neutral towards people on the other side. However, while levels of in-party warmth have remained stable since then, feelings towards the out-party have plummeted.The dynamics are similar in the UK, where the Brexit vote was deeply divisive. A 2019 study revealed that while UK citizens were not particularly identified with political parties, they held strong identities as remainers or leavers. Their perceptions were sharply partisan, with each side regarding its supporters as intelligent and honest, while viewing the other as selfish and close-minded. The consequences of hating political out-groups are many and varied. It can lead people to support corrupt politicians, because losing to the other side seems unbearable. It can make compromise impossible even when you have common political ground. In a pandemic, it can even lead people to disregard advice from health experts if they are embraced by opposing partisans.The negativity that people feel towards political opponents is known to scientists as affective polarisation. It is emotional and identity-driven – “us” versus “them”. Importantly, this is distinct from another form of division known as ideological polarisation, which refers to differences in policy preferences. So do we disagree about the actual issues as much as our feelings about each other suggest?Despite large differences in opinion between politicians and activists from different parties, there is often less polarisation among regular voters on matters of policy. When pushed for their thoughts about specific ideas or initiatives, citizens with different political affiliations often turn out to agree more than they disagree (or at least the differences are not as stark as they imagine).More in Common, a research consortiumthat explores the drivers of social fracturing and polarisation, reports on areas of agreement between groups in societies. In the UK, for example, they have found that majorities of people across the political spectrum view hate speech as a problem, are proud of the NHS, and are concerned about climate change and inequality.As psychologist Anne Wilson and her colleagues put it in a recent paper: “Partisans often oppose one another vehemently even when there is little actual daylight between their policy preferences, which are often tenuously held and contextually malleable.”This relative lack of divergence would, of course, come as a surprise to partisans themselves. This is the phenomenon of false polarisation, whereby there is widespread misperception of how much people on the left and the right are divided, not only on issues but also in their respective ways of life. When asked to estimate how many Republicans earn more than $250,000 a year, for example, Democrats guessed 38%. In reality it is 2%. Conversely, while about 6% of Democrats self-identify as members of the LGBT community, Republicans believed it was 32%. New research from Victoria Parker and her colleagues finds that partisans are especially likely to overestimate how many of their political opponents hold extreme opinions. Those overestimates, in turn, are associated with a disinclination to talk or socially engage with out-party members, avoidance that is likely to prevent people from forming more accurate impressions of the other side.What drives these misperceptions? And why do citizens so dislike one another if they aren’t necessarily deeply divided on policy matters? Politicians certainly have incentives to sharpen differences in order to motivate and mobilise voters, rallying support by portraying themselves as bulwarks against the barbarians on the other side. Divisiveness also plays well on social media, where extreme voices are amplified. Moral outrage is particularly likely to go viral.In a recent project led by Steve Rathje and Sander van der Linden at Cambridge University, we examined more than 2.5m posts on Twitter and Facebook. We found that posts were significantly more likely to be shared or retweeted if they referenced political opponents. Every word about the out-group increased the odds of a post being shared by 67% – and these posts were, in turn, met with anger and mockery.In this increasingly toxic environment, reducing false polarisation and affective polarisation are major challenges. It is often suggested, for example, that if people were only to expose themselves to perspectives from the other side, it would breed greater understanding and cooperation. Yet this intuition turns out to be flawed.The big idea: Is the era of the skyscraper over?Read moreSociologist Christopher Bail and his colleagues offered sets of Democrats and Republicans money to follow a bot that would retweet messages from politicians, media companies and pundits every day for a month. Importantly, the messages always came from the other side of the political spectrum. Far from promoting harmony, it backfired. After a month of being exposed to conservative talking points, Democrats’ attitudes had become, if anything, marginally more liberal. And Republicans became more conservative following their diet of liberal views. When what you see from the other side strikes you as biased or obnoxious, it doesn’t endear you to their perspectives.In this regard, the behaviour of elites matters. Political scientist Rasmus Skytte showed people messages from politicians that were either civil or rude. Interestingly, aggressive and unkind messages didn’t reduce trust in politicians or increase affective polarisation. It seems that incivility is what people have come to expect. But when they saw polite and respectful messages, they subsequently felt more trust towards politicians and became less affectively polarised.These results suggest that we should expect better from our leaders and those with large platforms. Don’t reward divisive rhetoric with “likes”. Instead, follow politicians and pundits who embody norms of respect and civility, even when they disagree on policy matters. In fact, many of us might be better off if we took a break from social media altogether. When economists found that whenpeople who were encouraged people to disconnect from Facebook for a month spent less time online and were less politically polarised. They also experienced improved psychological wellbeing.No one these days is worried that our societies are insufficiently polarised. But because so much of the polarisation is about emotions and identities rather than issues, it is still not clear that citizens are presented with good choices or that important issues are being deeply debated. Here again, we must expect better. Demand that politicians and pundits get into policy specifics. Let’s focus more on actual ideas for solving actual problems, where we, as citizens, may well turn out to agree on more than we realise. Dominic Packer and Jay Van Bavel are psychologists and the authors of The Power of Us. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.Further readingUncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity by Lilliana Mason (Chicago, £19)Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing by Chris Bail (Princeton, £20)The Wealth Paradox: Economic Prosperity and the Hardening of Attitudes by Frank Mols and Jolanda Jetten (Cambridge, £19.99)TopicsBooksThe big ideaSociety booksSocial trendsSocial mediaDigital mediaPsychologyUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Last Best Hope by George Packer review – shrewd analysis of America’s ruptures

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      George Packer’s incisive, deftly argued book about the moral and political quandary of the United States begins and ends with his declaration: “I am an American.” The statement is self-evident but also self-congratulatory: Americans regard their citizenship as a spiritual credential, a gesture of faith in the country that has always claimed to be the last, best hope of beleaguered mankind. Packer’s native land, however, no longer deserves to be quite so certain of its exceptional virtue or its automatic pre-eminence. Early in the pandemic it had to accept charitable handouts from Russia and Taiwan, and Packer sadly accepts a new, reduced reality by calling America “a beggar nation” and even “a failed state”. After this he twists his title from a boast into an abject plea: “No one is going to save us. We are our last best hope.”The need for salvation became urgent before the election last November when Packer, having moved his family from Brooklyn to a Covid-free rural retreat, noticed a sign beside the road on a neighbouring farm. His car headlights flashed across a red rectangle branded with five white capital letters. Even here, Packer realised with a shudder, he was not safe. He doesn’t need to say what the letters spelled out: they were as succinctly satanic as the number 666 – the mark of the beast in the Book of Revelation – which made Nancy Reagan alter the street address of a house where she and the retiring president were due to live in Los Angeles.Superstitiously refusing to name Trump when he reads the campaign sign, Packer eventually recognises his “reptilian genius” – a talent for sniffing out and then stoking up the grudges of voters in the “terra incognita” that lies between America’s shining seas. A self-accusing shock follows. As the election draws near, Packer sees shop owners fortifying their premises. “Millions of people were arming up,” says this impeccably liberal urban man. He then adds: “I wondered if I should do the same.” Of course he decides not to, but the damage is done: his panicked reaction testifies to the collapse of the trust in others that sustains democracy. The problem, Packer acknowledges, is “not who Trump was, but who we are”. The first verb in that sentence is happily in the past tense, but the second remains in the troubled present: the populace empowered the vicious populist in the first place, and may yet allow him to revive his lawless, larcenous, nepotistic sideshow.Packer – who as well as contributing to the New Yorker and the Atlantic has edited collections of George Orwell’s essays – goes on to attempt something close to the ideological fables in Animal Farm or Nineteen Eighty-Four. He dramatises a “cold civil war” between four incompatible versions of the US: the Free America of libertarian Reagan, the Smart America of Clinton-era technocrats, the Real America of Trump the bottom-feeding demagogue, and the Just America of #MeToo and BLM. Each has its own narrative, abhors the others as existential enemies, and regards compromise as betrayal.The US has had many crises: a nation founded on a messianic idea can redeem itself by reaffirming first principles“I don’t much want to live in the republic of any of them,” Packer concludes. He smirks about customers at Walgreen drugstores and members of Rotary clubs in the heartland, snidely notes Sarah Palin’s post-political career as an “autographed merchandise saleswoman”, and even derides the “sagging bellies” of the marauders who invaded the Capitol on 6 January, as if their obesity was the worst thing about them. But all these alien groups have to be included in democracy’s gathering of “We the people”: Packer’s sniffy attitude is a symptom of the problem he defines. An “epistemic rupture”, he says, has made Americans “profoundly unreal to one another”; lacking a shared reality, they have burrowed into partisan encampments or sealed themselves in digital ghettoes, echo chambers of angry prejudice.The relevance of this depressing analysis extends across the ocean. Disaffected American activists in red and blue states fantasise about secession; here a fraying union is much more likely to fall apart. Packer believes that his country’s dualistic political parties have in effect changed places, with the Democrats now “the home of affluent professionals, while the Republicans… sound like populist insurgents”. Hasn’t the same switchover happened with Labour and the Tories? Packer calls Trump “an all-American flimflam man”; Boris Johnson is our homegrown equivalent, the embodiment of all that is bogus, smug and sloppily amateurish in this country – though at least Trump transmitted a sulphurous “dark energy”, whereas Johnson mainly gives vent to verbal flatulence. Trump, Packer says in passing, “levelled everyone down together”: that exposes Boris’s blather about “levelling up” as an empty, opportunistic play on words. Commenting on an American meritocracy whose sole merit is its luck on the stock market, Packer predicts: “As with any hereditary ruling class, political power will fall into the hands of increasingly inferior people.” To prove his point locally, I nominate slick Sunak, shifty Hancock, Patel the bully and Williamson the schoolroom dunce.Packer is still able to cheer himself up at the end by reiterating: “I am an American and there’s no escape.” After our own disastrous epistemic episode, what can we say? We’re no longer Europeans, and only foreigners call us Brits, which they generally do while rolling their eyes in exasperation. Belonging by birth to none of the UK’s four tribes, I sometimes feel like a stateless refugee holed up in the republic of my house. Although America suffered through what Packer calls “a near-death experience” with Trump, it has had many such crises and has recovered from them all: a nation founded on a messianic idea can always redeem itself by reaffirming first principles, as Joe Biden seems determined to do. The UK lacks an originating myth or mission, and thus has no sense of purpose, no means of renewal, and nothing to look forward to but pitiful decline. Despite imperial puffery, we may never have been the best, but we used to be better than this. Now we seem doomed to be last, and there’s no hope anywhere. More

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      QAnon and on: why the fight against extremist conspiracies is far from over

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      On 7 January this year, a day after the mob stormed the Capitol in Washington DC, a curious exchange occurred in the netherworld of global conspiracy. Alex Jones, the rasp-voiced mouthpiece of fake news for the past decade, was in conversation with the most visible leader of the previous day’s shocking events: Jacob Chansley, the self-styled “Q Shaman” who featured on the world’s front pages, in buffalo horns, animal skins and face paint.Jones, on his fake-news platform Infowars, with its million-plus viewers and sharers, had for years been the loudhailer of unhinged stories that included the belief that Hillary Clinton was the antichrist, that Michelle Obama was a man, that the Pentagon and George Soros had detonated a “homosexual bomb” that turned even frogs gay, that 9/11 had been a “false flag” operation and, most viciously, that the Sandy Hook school murders, in which 20 children and six teachers died, were staged by “crisis actors” to promote gun control. Jones had inevitably been among those who addressed the restive crowd at Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” march (having donated $50,000 for the staging of the rally) and calling for supporters to “get on a war footing” to defend the president. Two days later, however, when faced with the rhetoric of Chansley, whom he had invited on to his show to explain the insurrection, it seemed even he, America’s conspirator in chief, finally couldn’t take the lies any more.As the Q Shaman launched into his justification of the mob violence that had left five people dead, a diatribe involving reference to the supposed QAnon revelations that the Democratic party was a front for a satanic paedophile ring that Trump was destined to expose and destroy, Jones repeatedly interrupted him. When Chansley asked plaintively why he wouldn’t listen (“you’re a hero to me, man”), Jones cut him off: “Because you’re full of crap!” he yelled. “That’s why! Because every goddamned thing out of you people’s mouths doesn’t come true. I knew what you were on day one and I know what you are now and I’m sick of it! I’m sick of all these witches and warlocks… I can’t talk to you any more. Jesus Christ! Lord help me. Aaargh!”This apparent volte face, disowning a web of untruths that he himself had enthusiastically propagated, was a surprise even to the most dedicated of Jones-watchers. During the Trump era, Dan Friesen and Jordan Holmes, a pair of standup comedians from Chicago, had performed the invaluable public service of debunking some of Jones’s wilder theories in a conversational podcast, Knowledge Fight. The events of January, however, gave them the sense that Jones “just felt less and less in control of what he was doing”. They had long been reluctant connoisseurs of the Texan’s rants but from that moment in January onwards, they felt they were witnessing a man flailing in the tide of his own untruths.One reading of this abrupt change suggested that Jones, who had made millions of dollars selling “potency pills” to his cultish followers, finally understood that the game was up. For the past year or more, he has been losing a series of legal appeals against the right of the Sandy Hook parents to sue him for defamation and end the unpardonable harassment that had seen them hounded by trolls who believed Infowars’ lies (the channel sent “investigators” to Sandy Hook to try to disinter the bodies of their murdered children and posted pictures that purported to show them alive and well; one parent, Leonard Pozner, who has led the case against Jones, has had to go into hiding to protect himself from reprisals). That legal process threatens to ruin Jones financially; later this summer it should see him face a fuller judicial reckoning. Having exhausted all other defences, his last line of argument appears to be that he – and his millions of followers – had known it was simply a joke all along.Another, more widely optimistic, reading of Jones’s meltdown is the proposition that the destructive forces of alt right conspiracy are finally in retreat. It is hard to imagine the rise of Trump without the environment of outlandish falsehood that preceded him. If Fox News offered mainstream support to that war on reality, then Jones was a big part of its militia wing. When Trump first announced that he was running for the presidency he appeared on Infowars to tell Jones: “Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down”, endorsing the host’s message that there was a secret liberal deep state cabal that controlled the world. In the months of campaigning that followed, when Trump shouted “Lock her up” of his opponent, Hillary Clinton, he knew he was preaching to the Infowars converted. On the morning after his inauguration, in 2017, Jones was among the first people Trump contacted to thank him for the help he had given.The optimism that sees the events in the Capitol as the last chapter of that story, however, must be heavily tempered with the fear that rather than representing an endgame, it instead highlighted a first dramatic skirmish in a new kind of warfare. That contention is at the heart of a compelling book, The Storm Is Upon Us, to be published this week, by the California-based journalist Mike Rothschild. The book examines the internet-based conspiracies that led to the assault on the Capitol in forensic detail, in particular the story of QAnon, the obscure series of anonymous “prophecies” that became the declared philosophy of many of those who travelled from across the country intent on overturning Joe Biden’s election victory, the philosophy that even Jones thought was a conspiracy too far.Rothschild’s book is a profoundly sobering read for anyone who retains faith in the inevitable progress of human reason, or a belief that in a free-speech environment where all opinions are given equal weight, Enlightenment views will necessarily prevail over violent untruths. It traces how a series of “data drops” from an anonymous poster QAnon – claiming to be a senior Pentagon insider – on the renegade internet platform 4chan came to be taken as prophetic gospels by thousands of disgruntled middle Americans staring at their screens.There had been precedents for such cultish frenzies of course, particularly in the US, but none has received the kind of official amplification and sanction as QAnon. What began as a development of the wilder culture and antisemitic tropes of so-called Pizzagate, quickly became a catch-all “philosophy” to politicise and explain the many “evils” of the world. That code was amplified by Trump supporters ranging from Jones to former national security adviser Michael Flynn and presidential confidant Roger Stone, who identified with QAnon’s theories about the way the deep state had “stolen” the election and urged Trump to declare martial law – another QAnon prophecy – in advance of the 2020 election. Trump’s sons Donald Jr and Eric both played to a QAnon audience, while nearly 100 Republican candidates declared themselves to be QAnon believers, with several winning their elections, including House representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.As Rothschild details, the bulk of Q followers had little history of extremism but they came to see themselves as “patriotic researchers”, uniquely able to distil fragments of truth from the “drops” of fictional coded information. Some proudly described themselves as “autists,” insinuating patterns unavailable to the unenlightened, patterns that allowed them to understand, for example, “that when [CIA chief] James Comey tweeted about the death of his dog Benji in early November 2018, he was really signalling to the world that George HW Bush would be executed two weeks later – because autists know that pictures of dogs sent by prominent deep-state members are actually secret messages announcing an execution”.So seductive were the internet rabbit holes into which they descended, a process of radicalisation familiar to cult-watchers, that in some cases families were abandoned and plots were hatched, including bomb threats, kidnap attempts and plans to destroy a coronavirus hospital ship. By 6 January 2021, QAnon devotees had for so long promised that a “storm” of mass arrests and executions would sweep “child molesters” and liberals out of government for ever that some were triggered to carry out that long-promised purge themselves.In detailing this radicalisation, Rothschild’s book emphasises the truth that among all the complex crises of our times the fundamental one is that of information, its quality and its reach. I remember at the time of the arrival of social media, 20 years ago, sitting through various presentations from a series of highly paid “internet gurus” who talked in messianic terms about a coming age of “citizen journalism”. Once the “gatekeepers” of the “legacy media” were removed, they argued – all those dogged hacks on local newspapers who have subsequently lost their livelihoods – there would be a wondrous revolution in transparency. This utopian vision could apparently see no potential issues with a mass system of anonymous communication in which there was no accountability for inaccuracy and no barriers to entry. I sat in those presentations thinking: have these people never read a history book?Speaking to Rothschild at his home in last week, he suggested that one of the lessons of the QAnon story is how that naivety worked both ways. “Even now,” he suggests, “there is still something in most people’s mind that believes things that happen on the internet don’t really matter. That it’s not real life.” What the QAnon story shows is that “online communities are more real to a lot of these people than their actual lives”.When Rothschild first started reporting on QAnon, a couple of months after the first drops, most reporters, if they looked at the story at all, viewed it “as just the next version of whatever crazy thing the Trump people were pushing that week”. He detected in its profile something a little different – it had very similar makeup, he thought, to these “affinity frauds” that have been running now for 20 years, which exploit the trust of peer recommendations in certain tight communities to fleece people of their life savings. But here, he says, you were selling not financial investments but “the powerful feelings that you would have when your enemies were brought to justice”.His book examines all the theories about QAnon’s original identity, without needing to come to a conclusion. Among the most plausible is that this was a kind of wicked experiment in human credulity. QAnon understood the power of story and parable. “I think, those early Q drops, the first maybe 130 drops [out of 4,592] were very skilfully written,” he says, “almost like the first chapters of a Tom Clancy novel… and it was a story that a lot of people bought into very quickly, because they wanted it to be true.” The first disciples were more than ready to believe that there was a judgment day approaching for these people at the heart of what Trump, Fox News and Jones had already spent a couple of years calling the deep state: Obama, George Soros, the Clintons. “I mean, there’s a reason why the first post was ‘Hillary Clinton will be arrested’,” Rothschild says. “This represented 30 years of wish-fulfilment. It was a Clinton, but it was almost more about Hillary than Bill. She was the one they really, really hated.”The story quickly found fertile ground among an audience spending many hours looking for the next excitement online, something to shock their followers with, a magnet for likes. Rothschild suggests that in the past some of this repressed anger might have been directed at neighbourhood issues, but in the vacuum of local newspapers a whole class of people who might have stood up in a PTA meeting and vented at the school board now believed they knew more about what was going on at a deputy assistant undersecretary’s office at the White House than at the end of their street. Social media algorithms offered no hierarchy to information and fed them more of what they liked. There was, in this conservative audience, Rothschild suggests, still a vestige of that feeling: “If I’m seeing a piece of media, it’s probably true. Nobody would lie in a news story…”Anybody can get sucked into cults. The moment you feel you are better than everybody else, you might be more vulnerableIn some ways, his book suggests, the only thing that prevented a deeper catastrophe in January was the demographic of those QAnon believers. A 2019 study by researchers at Princeton and New York University showed that Facebook users over the age of 65 were as much as seven times more likely to share fake-news stories and that held true with QAnon. Fortunately, Rothschild says: “This wasn’t Weimar Republic era paramilitaries. These were people who were 40, 50, 60. Many travelled a long distance and had a lot of disposable income to spend on tactical gear and flights and hotels. QAnon brought out something in these people who felt like their way of life was being destroyed by the relentless onslaught of progressivism. Donald Trump became their champion standing in the breach against the rising tide of liberalism.”The vision of that bizarre insurrection served to conclude the ongoing argument with social media platforms about their responsibility for policing extreme and deliberately false content. At the beginning of the pandemic, when it seemed that fake news might overwhelm public health messaging, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube and the rest were finally moved to take down some of the more threatening content, as bodies piled up in New York’s morgues.Jones had been among those who predictably trumpeted the anti-vax lines and 5G mast conspiracy that Piers Corbyn peddles to his mask-averse cranks. “This is the plan, folks,” Jones grunted at his viewers, early on. “They plan – now they’ve fluoridated you and vaccinated you and stunned you and mesmerised you with the TV and put you in a trance – on killing you.” The antidote to the virus, Jones claimed, lay in his own “wellness” products: SuperSilver whitening toothpaste and ABL Nano Silver Gargle that, he claimed, “kills the sars-corona family at point-blank range”. (The only proven effect of the active ingredient in these products, colloidal silver, is that it turns your skin blue.)The fact that social media giants had already cancelled Infowars accounts prevented the wider spread of this lethal nonsense; they now accepted a measure of responsibility to take down posts that claimed that 5G technology caused Covid-19, instead directing people toward accredited information.In the months since the January riots, the social media platforms have cracked down in a similar way on QAnon content, outlawing hashtags and catchphrases related to the conspiracy theory – “WWG1WGA” (“Where we go one we go all”), “the storm” and the “great awakening” – and shutting down thousands of accounts (including those of the ex-president). A report published by the Atlantic Council’s digital forensic research lab concluded that QAnon-related “chatter” surged enormously at the beginning of the pandemic and rose further in the lead-up to the Capitol riot, but had been reduced to a murmur in the months after Biden’s election.It is hard to read Rothschild’s book, however, without coming to the conclusion that the appetite for conspiracy has hardly diminished – some diehard QAnon followers still hold that the recount of the Arizona ballot will be decisive in overturning Biden’s election and restoring Trump to power. Meanwhile, the potent combination of tribal politics and the amplifying powers of social media continues to exert a hold. Rothschild reserves his anger in the book for those “conspiracy entrepreneurs”, including Jones and the Trump inner circle, who promoted these theories for financial or political gain, rather than the “digital foot soldiers”, often looking for community or belonging, who were seduced by them. “Maybe not everybody could be QAnon, because it takes a certain mentality,” he says, “but anybody can get sucked into conspiracy movements or cultic movements. You know, the moment you feel like you are better than everybody else, you might be more vulnerable than everybody else.”The pandemic created the perfect petri dish for such radicalisation – forcing people into isolation and to spending more time online. One of the seductive qualities of QAnon in this respect is that rather than presenting converts with a raft of developed theories, it acted as an invitation for them, in that favourite internet phrase, “to do their own research”. “Autists” became active participants in conspiracy creation, piecing together and sharing and creating clues, like medieval Bible scholars. You only have to look at forums such as “QAnon Casualties” on the Reddit platforms, a de-radicalisation and self-help conversation for cultists and their broken families, to see just how deep a hold the ideas can take on individuals.And of course this is far from a US-only phenomenon. Guardian research in the UK from the end of last year, before Facebook shut down tens of thousands of accounts, revealed a sharp rise in the use of QAnon terms among “an unlikely coalition of spirituality and wellness groups, vigilante ‘paedophile hunter’ networks, pre-existing conspiracy forums, local news pages, pro-Brexit campaigners and the far right”. Meanwhile a survey for Hope Not Hate, which monitors extremism, found that 17% of people when questioned said they believed Covid-19 was intentionally released as part of a “depopulation plan” by the UN or “new world order”; a quarter (25%) agreed that “secret satanic cults exist and include influential elites” and a similar proportion (26%) subscribed to the QAnon view that “elites in Hollywood, politics, the media and other powerful positions” were secretly engaged in child trafficking and abuse. The anti-lockdown gatherings in British cities, last week targeting the BBC journalist Nicholas Watt, are one meeting point for such theories.These trends support Rothschild’s suggestion that though QAnon itself has gone silent for six months, and thousands of spreader accounts have been deleted, “you still have a very large group of very malleable people. And it doesn’t take a lot for somebody to step in, start selling those people what they want to hear.”If there is a lesson of the past five years it is the ease and efficacy with which such lies can spread. QAnon is hopefully on its last legs, Rothschild says, “but there is a danger that whatever comes next might be even more powerful. My biggest hope is that we are able to recognise it and take it seriously. Not panic about it. But understand it, try to help debunk it and take it down before it gets to the point that QAnon got to. As we have seen,” he says, “it doesn’t take that long for these movements to curdle into violence.” More