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19 June 20
FOCUS: Nathan J. Robinson | Isn't "Right-Wing Populism" Just Fascism?
Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs
Excerpt: "It's a bad idea to listen to right-wingers who claim to be on the side of 'the people.' Usually it turns out they want to crush the people by force."
Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs
Excerpt: "It's a bad idea to listen to right-wingers who claim to be on the side of 'the people.' Usually it turns out they want to crush the people by force."
EXCERPTS:
et us ask a question: who are some famous “right-wing populists”? Well, let’s see, historically, Hitler and Mussolini can be categorized as “right-wing populists.” Today, there’s Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, a militaristic, sexist homophobe who said if he saw two men kissing in the street he would beat them. There’s Marine Le Pen in France: (“the progressive Islamisation of our country and the increase in political-religious demands are calling into question the survival of our civilisation.”) There’s Geert Wilders in the Netherlands: (“Islam is not a religion, it’s an ideology, the ideology of a r*tarded culture.”) Plus Viktor Orban in Hungary. And in the United States, there is Donald Trump, whose administration has engaged in ceaseless cruelty toward immigrants and who is currently trying to deploy the military against protesters.
And so it’s possible to get through The Populists’ Guide to 2020 and come away quite convinced of the central thesis, namely that the “populist right” and “populist left” have a lot in common and should band together to fight their common enemy, the dastardly Neoliberals. But Enjeti hits some strange and disquieting notes, at one point commenting that “Wall Street, Hollywood, the NBA, and nearly every other part of the commanding heights of American culture has been infested with Chinese cash.” Infested with Chinese cash? And when you watch the show, you’ll start to pick up on other disturbing beliefs. He is in favor of strict immigration controls (“if you want to expand the social safety net, you must inherently reduce the size of the population that that is going to apply to,” which is not true at all). During the current uprising, he has echoed Tom Cotton, even asking “Was it un-American when LBJ used the 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions to stop race riots in Detroit?” (To which the answer is, no, it wasn’t un-”American”—it was very American—but since the National Guard in Detroit ended up riddling a four-year-old Black girl with bullets, I would personally not cite the actions of racist mass murderer LBJ as a model to be emulated.) Enjeti also criticized protesters as somehow being in bed with corporations. If you watch and read enough of his work, you finally remember what Enjeti’s politics are: He’s pro-Trump, as evidenced by the fact that he proudly displays a picture of himself with the president on his Twitter profile.
And then we need to ask ourselves once again: What is this “right-wing populism,” exactly, with which we on the Left are supposed to comfortably ally ourselves? And if we get past our common criticisms of the Democratic establishment (which Trump makes too, and which he is often correct about), we remember that right-wing populism is simply the politics of Trump and Bolsonaro. It is racist, sexist, xenophobic. It is a giant fraud—Enjeti speaks of a politics that is “pro-worker” yet “socially conservative” (i.e., economically left but bigoted), but Trumpism isn’t even pro-worker. In practice, this politics leaves governing to the ultra-rich, people like Steven Mnuchin and Betsy DeVos, while gutting workplace safety regulations and trying to destroy workers’ ability to unionize. It is, as we can see from Enjeti and Trump’s approach to the current protests, not on the side of the dispossessed, but actually supports crushing them with the force of the state. It may sound a little socialist at times, but it is not the socialism of Karl Marx, who thought the workers of the world should unite. It is, instead, strictly nationalist. A kind of “national socialism,” if you will.
Let’s be clear about the implications of accepting the theory of politics presented in the Populist’s Guide to 2020. If we assume, as the book says, that the correct alliance is between the “new right” and “new left,” then Bernie Sanders supporters have more in common with Donald Trump than with Joe Biden. In fact, I think one could take away from this book that it would make more sense for the Left to vote for Trump than Biden. But this is madness: Trump represents everything we are trying to destroy. I have written before about the dangers of accepting “nationalism wrapped in socialist rhetoric,” in the context of reviewing Tucker Carlson’s book. Carlson, like Enjeti, rants about billionaire elites, but is also a racist whom the Daily Stormer has called their “greatest ally.” (Carlson blurbed The Populists’ Guide to 2020, alongside leftists like Nina Turner and Kyle Kulinski.) As Carlson’s reaction to these recent protests shows, these people are not our friends. Carlson has tried to terrify people into believing that “gangs of thugs” are coming to destroy their cities:
We have watched as mobs of violent cretins have burned our cities, defaced our monuments, beaten old women in the street, shot police officers and stolen everything in sight — stealing everything… How many innocent Americans have these people hurt? How many have they murdered? We don’t know that number. But it’s the country itself that so many of us worry about at this point…. Their latest demand is that we eliminate the police entirely. No more law enforcement in this country. That would mean more power for the mob. They could do anything. It would mean never-ending terror for you and for your family. That’s why they want it.
Of course, Carlson has no interest in actually trying to comprehend the arguments being made by police and prison abolitionists, which are about reducing terror—they don’t want a country where people are free to be as violent as they like, they want a country where violence is actually prevented effectively through nonviolent methods rather than just dealt with after the fact through the counterproductive method of caging millions of people. Carlson has long tried to whip up the fears of aggrieved white people—and he makes clear he’s talking to white people, warning of the fact that a country that was “European, Christian, and English-speaking fifty years ago has become a place with no ethnic majority,” and now “your neighbors are different.” (They may be Iraqis, for instance, whom Carlson thinks are “semiliterate primitive monkeys.“) He scares them whatever way they can, from talking points like we don’t know many people protesters have hurt so let’s assume it’s too many to count to phony immigrant crime statistics. This is a politics of fear and bigotry that targets the weak and will never actually redistribute any power.
The age-old labor question is “Which side are you on?” Carlson, Enjeti, Trump, Bolsonaro: They answer that question emphatically and openly. They are not on our side. They would use the might of the state against us. Right-wing “populism” is simply a lie and nobody who is on the Left should have anything to do with it.
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