Our forthcoming book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. GOP conservatism is in intellectual decline.
At New York, Ben Jacobs notes that CPAC has abandoned libertarian policy debate in favor of culture-war red meat. The GOP and the conservative movement have a dark European flavor.
Another sign of the Europeanization of the American conservatism was the growing presence of the international far right at the conference — and even the looming specter of white nationalism. There were recorded video messages from Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, as well as hard-right politicians in Spain and Croatia. During breaks in the conference, a video from “samurai futurologist” Gemki Fuji repeatedly played proclaiming Trump to be “a real American samurai” while a right-wing South Korean politician claimed his country saw left-wing voter fraud too.
Perhaps most unsettling was the appearance of Congressman Paul Gosar of Arizona on Saturday. Gosar, a hard right-wing backbencher who touted false claims of voter fraud before the assault on the Capitol on January 6, appeared on a panel on immigration less than 12 hours after appearing at a parallel but separate white-nationalist event sponsored by those who found CPAC full of squishy sellouts.
At that gathering, the six-term Arizona Republican’s speech was followed by remarks from a Holocaust denier who said America needed to protect its “white demographic core” and called the attack on the Capitol “awesome.” While onstage at CPAC, Gosar’s first remarks, without prompting, were “I want to tell you, I denounce . . . white racism” before shifting to the topic at hand.
...
The party of Lincoln is looking more and more like the party of Le Pen.
Charles Sykes at The Bulwark:nazi shit pic.twitter.com/O6N6SC9YpI
— Christian Vanderbrouk (@UrbanAchievr) February 25, 2021
This piece actually appears in the uber-Trumpy American Greatness, a journal with intellectual pretensions, and numerous connections to TrumpWorld.
The author, Alexander Zubatov, opens with a dystopian scene of New York City.
It is evening, very late evening. I am walking in the remains of what once was New York City. Broken trash bags and discarded clothing, furniture and debris line the sidewalks, spilling out onto the streets, the bags’ black plastic jerking and lurching as though some near-suffocated life within were struggling to break free of confinement.
But his loathing — his unalloyed contempt — is reserved for the people he encounters. He simply cannot accept their humanity.The first higher species of being I come across is only a shadow of any such description—a teetering, drooling zombie barely maintaining the accustomed vertical orientation of humanity—its head, neck, and back doubling over further and further, heavy eyelids drooping down time and again on the remaining vestiges of any consciousness to which it only weakly clings. I hear a dead moan as I pass.His language is not veiled or ambiguous. He refers to people as “it” and “specimens.” They are ”lazy leeches, slugs, thugs” who claim to be the victims of white people. He describes “two brown bums,” who dance “like ungainly insects,” and encounters a “sunken-cheeked Arab”. Everyone is described by the color of their skin or their ethnicity.
“I navigate around one such specimen transecting the middle of the sidewalk, with the telltale final bottle capping off its drunken stupor still clasped in its gnarled fingers.”
....
It would be alarming, but not shocking, if this appeared in a marginal publication deep in the fever swamps of the white nationalist Alt Right. If we found it, for example, on Stormfront, it would barely merit mention.
But this racist rant about human scum and whips appears in a publication whose contributors include such right-wing luminaries as Victor David Hanson, Roger Kimball, Conrad Black, Salena Zito, Josh Hammer (who is also Newsweek’s opinion editor), Michael Anton, Ned Ryun, and Dennis Prager.
In other words, it is smack in the middle of the Trumpian Right.
And this is not a one-off. Some years back, American Greatness published something called “Cuck Elegy,” which was accurately described by the Washington Examiner as “an alt-right piece of literotica masquerading as a poem.”
It was also raw, undiluted racism:This is the Capitalist Pentecost...
Submit to the modernist’s spirit of avarice
Defer now to the mocha-skinned Lazarus
**
Exit take: Yes, the right has a white supremacy problem. But there are few signs that it will take Cheney’s warning seriously.
“Members of Clark County’s Republican party voted to censure Rep. Herrera Beutler...Toese, a prominent member of the Proud Boys, a neofascist organization that describes itself as ‘Western chauvinists,’ served as the meeting’s sergeant at arms.” https://t.co/gImCju3IEg
— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) February 27, 2021
