Charles,
Below is yet another bold juxtaposition of mine, featuring an analysis of today's populism/chauvinism in the US and Europe, on one hand, and an excerpt of your Nietzschean flak against (old-fashioned) anarchism....
Conspiracism as Scapegoating
From Whence a Mass Base?
Who joins right wing populist movements, and why? Hans-Georg Betz, in his study "Radical Right-wing Populism in Western Europe," noted one common theme among the contemporary right-wing populist movements he studied was xenophobia and racist scapegoating of immigrants and asylum-seekers.32 Betz argues that generally the right wing populists in Europe distanced themselves from open affiliation with the violent far right such as neonazis, avoided obvious and overt racism, and presented themselves as willing to make "a fundamental transformation of the exiting socioeconomic and sociopolitical system," while still remaining within reformism and claiming to represent "democratic alternatives to the prevailing system."33 This is similar to the main themes of right-wing populism in the US.
Betz's review of voting demographics in Europe reveals right-wing populist parties attract disproportionate numbers of men, persons employed in the private sector, and younger voters. In terms of social base, the rightist populism was more successful with "small entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, artisans, and other self-employed voters and among working class voters," although there is an attraction across many sectors.34
Anecdotal evidence suggests a similar constituency for right wing populists in the US. One 1995 Harris poll found that while 42% of citizens had a great deal of confidence in small businesses, the figure was only 19% for big businesses, and 8% for the federal government. The same poll found 60% favored restricting "state-provided social services to illegal immigrants.35 While some concerns are clearly economic, others are clearly social and cultural:
Some observers have attributed the movement to a backlash by angry white men who feel particularly disenfranchised by the social reforms of the `60s."
"The Patriot movement is made up mainly of alienated white men who yearn for their lost dominance," says Ted Arrington, chairman of the political science department at UNC-Charlotte, who has studied the literature of some local Patriot organizations. "The working guy hasn't seen his lot improved in a long time. He feels betrayed. The American Dream doesn't include him. It's a myth so far as he is concerned. Something's gone wrong."36
Conservative analyst Kevin Phillips compared the populist resurgence in the 1990s to previous examples in the 1890s and 1930's and found many of the same elements:
Economic anguish and populist resentment; mild-to-serious class rhetoric aimed at the rich and fashionable; exaltation of the ordinary American against abusive, affluent and educated elites; contempt for Washington; rising ethnic, racial and religious animosities; fear of immigrants and foreigners, and a desire to turn away from internationalism and concentrate on rebuilding America and American lives.37
Phillips wrote of the connection between populism and fascism in the context of weak centrist parties: "The sad truth is that frustration politics has built to a possibly scary level precisely because of the unnerving weakness of the major parties and their prevailing philosophies." Phillips cited both Republicans and Democrats for "jointly reenacting some of the ineptness and miscalculation of Germany's Weimar Republic" After decrying liberal elitism and arrogance, Phillips condemned Republican politicians who have "periodically unleashed the anti-black and anti-Israel messages they now complain about in more blunt politicians as `bigotry.' Conservatives and nationalists in Germany in the late 1920's and early 1930's behaved somewhat similarly." According to Phillips, "If Patrick Buchanan is to be put in a 1930-something context, so should the second-rate conservatives and liberals responsible for the economic and social failures from which he and other outsiders have drawn so many angry votes."38
Direct link:
publiceye.org
Now, taking into account the above portraying of what Nietzche has labelled as a "no-gooder mentality" --ie ressentiment of the disenfranchised, alienated dropouts of the so-called American Dream-- I have rewritten the AntiChrist vs. the Anarchist scrap, replacing anarchis(t/m) with chauvinis(t/m).
The Antichrist Versus The Chauvinist
Bakunin said, "the urge to destroy is a creative urge also." But as Nietzsche pointed out, sometimes the urge to destroy is--let's face it--an Urge to Destroy.
Of course, Nietzsche is well aware of the truth in Bakunin's insight. In fact he expressed the same idea much more eloquently than did Bakunin: "The desire for destruction, change and becoming can be an expression of an overflowing energy that is pregnant with future . . . ." [GS 329] So, yes, it can be creative.
"But," he adds, "it can also be the hatred of the ill-constituted, disinherited, and underprivileged, who destroy, must destroy, because what exists, indeed all existence, all being, outrages and provokes them. To understand this feeling, consider our chauvinists closely." [GS 329] This is almost touching: "our chauvinists." How many philosophers have been willing to claim as their own these oft-scorned stepchildren of politics? Nietzsche does, and even seeks to understand their feelings! What he discovers is that "our chauvinists," poor souls that they are, are in the grips of a nihilistic rage against reality.
When he speaks of "our chauvinists," Nietzsche has in mind a certain kind of chauvinist. His model is not the chauvinist who is a fanatic for law-and-order, but rather the one who is obsessed with prejudice. For him, this chauvinist is just the extreme type of a certain kind of revolutionary, one who expresses viscerally the revolt of the masses, of the downtrodden, of the "underprivileged." The chauvinist is thus the purest and most spiritually contaminated expression of a certain kind of reactivity, the perfect embodiment of reactive revolt. Nietzsche's stinging charge against such a chauvinism is that it is, at its deepest level, reactionary. Reaction is not the exclusive preserve of the right, in Nietzsche's perceptive analysis.
Though Nietzsche doesn't hesitate to cast aspersions on the "underprivileged" and their self-ordained champions, his critique is no simplistic defense of "privilege." He can as well as anyone attack and demolish the smug pretensions of the privileged. After all, it is those very "privileged" who overturned the old order of privilege to create the mass society and herd morality that Nietzsche detests so fervently. He sides neither with the established order nor with those who struggle to topple it. For Nietzsche, to paraphrase Bierce, conservatives are those who heroically defend the old absurdities, while "our chauvinists" are those who strive mightily to replace them with older ones. His critique is thus a diagnosis of a sensibility rooted in reactivity, ressentiment, and one-sided negativity. Those of "our chauvinists" who fall prey to such an insidious sensibility become obsessed with the prejudices of the existing world and with their own powerlessness in the face of such evil. They are in effect, the mirror image of those slavish souls who are entranced and corrupted by the awe-inspiring spectacle of power, wealth and privilege. But in the case of our rebellious little chauvinists, the spirit is poisoned by an impotent, reactive rage.
It is Nietzsche the Antichrist who savagely attacks the Chauvinist, since chauvinism for him is a kind of Christianity. He does not, by the way, mean by "Christianity" the spiritually and socially inflammatory teachings of Jesus, which he shows to be ironically negated by the entire history of the Church. He means, rather, the reactive institutional Christianity that retreats into pessimism and nihilism in its utter dissatisfaction with the world. Nietzsche's indictment of Christianity and chauvinism resembles Hegel's dissection of the "Beautiful Soul." For Hegel, the moral idealist creates a dream world with little connection to ethical reality, the embodiment of good in the actual world. But Nietzsche is much more scathing in his assault on such idealism. The "Beautiful Soul" is for him a quite "Ugly Soul," corrupted by its narrowness and alienation from the truths of experience and the virtues of the world.
If the higher person, the šbermensch, is like a vast sea in which immense evil is diluted and dissolved, the moral purist is a small stagnant puddle, in which the most exalted goodness putrefies. "The Christian and the chauvinist: both decadents, both incapable of having any effect other than disintegrating, poisoning, withering, bloodsucking; both the instinct of mortal hatred against everything that stands, that stands in greatness, that has duration, that promises life a future." [A 648] The tragic flaw in both these character-structures results from an identification of the self with an ungrounded, ahistorical ideal. The result is a rage against the the real, in which the most authentic achievements evoke the most intense reactive hostility, since they threaten the necessity of the absolute break with what exists, l'‚cart absolu, that has become a psychological necessity.
Nietzsche's image of the chauvinist is inspired by the classical chauvinist revolutionary who was the reactive response to the industrializing, accumulative capitalism and the centralizing, bureaucratically expanding nation-state of the 19th century. Yet much of what he says also characterizes--perhaps even better--various strands of Western chauvinism that emerged in the 1960's and which linger on in certain subcultures. Such a chauvinism defines itself practically by what it is against. It fumes and fulminates against "all forms of pluralism," by which it means every one of this fallen world's institutions and social practices, none of which has any liberatory potential.
This is the chauvinism of permanent protest. The chauvinism of militant marginality. The chauvinism of sectarian theoretical purity. The chauvinism of grand gestures that become increasingly petty and indeed meaningless as they are dissolved in the vast Post-mortem Ocean of Signifiers. As sophisticated surrealism becomes the stuff of advertising and music videos, and the entire culture lapses into brutal cynicism tinged with irony, all homely gestures of resistance, all sighs on behalf of the oppressed, all "critiques of all forms of pluralism," all this becomes low-level noise, lost in a din of background noise (The High Deci-Bel Epoque). Though if any of it happens to be mildly interesting, it can be recycled as bits and pieces of style.
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