| | | Why conservatives embrace extremism
How the Trumpist fantasies destroy the moderate right
Let me assume that you are a conservative. Naturally, you do not have a great deal of time for liberals and leftists – and that is your prerogative. In normal circumstances it should be unimaginable that your legitimate criticisms and well-grounded positions would push you into supporting Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.
There is no logical reason why opposition to treating biological men as women should lead you to endorse the storming of the US Congress.
Or why a belief in lower taxes should persuade you to ignore the mass murders, tortures, rapes and child abductions perpetrated by Vladimir Putin’s invading armies in Ukraine.
Or why dislike of woke cancel culture should compel you to purge the American civil service.
These are not just pernicious positions to take. They are ridiculous. The premise bears no relation to the conclusion. The former has no connection to the latter.
Attitudes to gender, rules on freedom of speech, decisions on levels of taxation and migration, are debated by democracies all the time. They should not transform conservatives into anti-democratic far rightists.
And yet the leaders and intellectuals of the modern conservative movement make the ridiculous appear reasonable and the pernicious virtuous. They have either taken up permanent residence on the far right or they are so used to ignoring its deceits they have become – to turn one of their own cliches against them – extremism’s useful idiots.
They justify the unconscionable by elevating the left into a tyrannical force with supernatural powers to brainwash and control. Once that bait is taken, they can justify any crime.
On Thursday, to take the latest example, Trump put Kash Patel in charge of the FBI with the approval of a compliant Congress. Patel believes that: “The Deep state is continuing to weaponize the power of the state against internal dissidents. They are the ones who covered up their own crimes. … They are the criminals.”
If you think that a cabal of criminal conspirators controls the forces of law and order, then any attack on democracy, its institutions, and the rule of law is justifiable if it breaks their tyrannical power. Trump is entitled to turn the FBI into a private police force tasked with hunting down these diabolical opponents who must be destroyed by any means necessary.
Liz Truss, surely the sorriest excuse for a prime minister in British history, is clear on this point. She believes the economic calamity she inflicted on the UK was not her fault – for nothing is ever her fault – but the fault of a conspiracy by the Bank of England and Treasury. This week she said the UK needed its own Trump movement because
“The same people are still making the decisions. It’s the deep state, it’s the unelected bureaucrats, it’s the judiciary.”
Believe this and you can see why the far right won’t condemn Putin. At least he is honest and Christian and, now you come to mention it, white. At least he condemns the liberal west for its “overthrow of faith and traditional values”. Listen to some of his speeches and you might be forgiven for thinking that Vance or Truss or Trump had written them.
After all, what is Western democracy? It is a sham. It is a lie. Liberals have no legitimacy. They are not honourable opponents but puppet masters who use their control of education and the mainstream media to brainwash the public with what Elon Musk calls the “woke mind virus” – sickness to be eradicated, you will have noticed, rather than a set of ideas open to debate.
How can democracy mean anything when these sinister progressives have marched through the institutions to ensure, as Truss says, that “the same people” are always in charge no matter how the public votes?
And then there is the racism. You cannot separate the rise of the far right from racial paranoia. Versions of the Great Replacement Theory are everywhere. It holds that members of liberal elites – usually Jews – are destroying the West by flooding it with migrants – usually Muslims. The migrants then become electoral fodder for progressive parties and further entrench their control.
The theory conveniently allows the far right to reject the results of every election it loses. It can always say that its opponents won with the votes of migrants, who should never have been in the country in the first place.
A bitter old wine is being decanted into shiny new bottles.
To pick one of thousands of examples, Elon Musk made it clear that he was preparing another assault on American democracy should Trump lose the 2024 presidential election. In tweets that received tens of millions of views, Musk pretended that “the Dem administrative state is flying millions of future voters directly into swing states. [...] Given that this is a sure path to permanent one-party rule.”
He wanted a lie that would delegitimise a Kamala Harris victory
The communists justified dictatorship by saying that democracy was a sham because capitalists secretly pulled the strings of power. The Nazis justified their dictatorship by saying the Jews controlled democracies. Today’s far right says democracy is a sham because the progressive elite rigs elections with migrants and covertly controls the deep state.
A bitter old wine is being decanted into shiny new bottles.
If the right were not caught up in paranoid fantasies, it ought to have turned on Trump this week as he poured out lies about Ukraine that might have been written by the Kremlin.
Trump denied that Russia had launched an unprovoked imperial land grab and pretended that the war was Ukraine’s fault. “You should’ve never started it,” he babbled at the Ukrainians. “You could’ve made a deal.” It was as if Ukraine had invaded itself in February 2022.
Ukraine should suspend martial law and hold elections, he continued, a move that could only help the invading Russians advance further. Trump lied about Zelensky’s approval ratings, about the level of European support – lie after lie, delivered with a venom the US right never shows when it discusses Putin or Xi.
As the US abandoned Ukraine, and talked as if it was preparing to abandon Europe, an outfit called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship was meeting in London. Its speakers said they were celebrating a “vibe shift” in favour of Trump. They picked the wrong country to party in.
The rally featured people who claim to defend Western civilisation: Nigel Farage, Kemi Badenoch, Niall Ferguson, Jordan Peterson, Douglas Murray…All the old gang, singing all the old tunes.
At the very moment when Western civilisation was under attack by Putin, they could not utter one word of condemnation. Actually, I am being too kind – it’s a fault of mine, I know. They barely discussed Ukraine at all.
Take Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the British Tory party, who addressed the gathering. Overseas readers who do not know who Badenoch is should not be ashamed. Most British people don’t know either.
A minor character in the troupe of global rightists that performed in London, but she nevertheless had the party line word perfect.
“This is the real poison of left-wing progressivism, whether it’s pronouns or DEI or climate activism,” Badenoch said. “These issues aren’t about kindness. They are about control.”
There was much more in this vein. Until Badenoch reached the nub of it. Far from being a gangster who was selling out Europe to its Russian enemies, Trump was a leader who was “telling the truth,” and taking on our real enemy, which turned out not to be Vladimir Putin but the “intellectual elite”.
Like Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Nigel Farage, Kemi Badenoch has become a British right-wing leader who would rather betray her country than take on Trump. Their friends, if they have friends, should warn them that they now have to choose between Putin and Ukraine, the US and the UK, fascistic fantasies and the defence of the West.
And if they make the wrong choice, it is only fair to tell them that they will be hit with a real “vibe shift” that will knock them off their feet. |
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