Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Likeness
01: History’s over, kids. Stop playing Nazis and Soviets and come back inside!
Liberal triumphalism in the face of the USSR’s collapse has become far more sour than sweet as time goes on. The general concept of ideological triumphalism means to be victorious at the end of ideology, to succeed in the historical mission of 1) finding the “great idea” (i.e., the idea that will provide human prosperity, stability, and serve their interests and agencies in the best possible way), and 2) to have beaten all other legitimate rivals. Earthly time, according to the conditions of this victory, has been set toward a given political ideology (the doctrine of the great idea) and cannot be unset, changed, or reverted back to any other. It doesn’t say “time cannot change” or that “no other ideologies exist or no new ideologies will emerge.” Rather, the sinister essence of its message as used by liberals is to say that collective human agencies cannot be effectively wielded towards their own triumphant results (thus resulting in a successful alternative epoch to liberal time) against the current and supposed triumphant ideology of liberalism. “The clocks have been set since 1945, and they cannot be reset,” as the prophets of late modernity chant. But time kept on ticking anyway. The great irony of all of this is that really existing liberal triumphalism ended when the Soviet Union began to crack open, and Fukuyama’s slogan was both overplayed and late to the liberal triumphalism party. The revolutions of 1989 spelled the end of the end of history for liberalism.
From at least the 1970s, a rise of political parties belonging to a particular form of right-wing illiberalism appeared, which various academics have since labeled as “radical right-wing populism” (Hans-Georg Betz), “national populism” (Roger Eatwell, Matthew Goodwin), “populist radical right” (Cas Mudde), and “democratic right-wing populism” (Roger Griffin). Since Being’s a Griffinite, we’ll use his label but shorten it to DRWP. The essence of what is being discussed under these various labels is ethnocratic populism. The general mission of this is to transform liberal democracies from “multicultural globalist nightmares” into “monocultural nationalist democracies.” To properly explain this further, we need to unpack ethnocracy, populism, and its particular synthesis here.
Ethnocracy is the “rule of like over like,” as society is controlled by a dominant ethnicity, by which membership (or citizenship), power, and resources are measured. This rule, as imagined by the DRWP, is a procedural democracy in which elections take place and constitutional law is observed (albeit abused) to serve the dominant ethnicity (those with full membership in civil society), while other ethnicities are excluded or repressed. This produces a unique form of government where democratic participation and guaranteed security of rights are provided to one group of people, but other groups of people are subjected to extreme authoritarian conditions. The DRWP, as it exists within liberal democracy, wants to create (or recreate) this monocultural nativist state that will separate “the people” from “native” and "non-native.” The identity of the “native” is protected by closing borders and tightening security against the “non-natives” on the outside. Those “non-natives” already on the inside are forced to either assimilate or repatriate, become "native,” or be removed and returned to wherever their ancestors came from.
Populism, as defined by Cas Mudde, is a thin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic camps, “the pure people” versus “the corrupt elite,” and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people. Populism’s “thin-centered” nature is contrasted with those ideologies that are "thick-centered," i.e., liberalism, conservatism, socialism, and fascism. This “thinness” means that as a broader ideology, it can appear within permutations of those “thick ideologies” across the political spectrum. This unique fluidity of ideological manifestation even means that it can even appear as a core component within a “thick ideology,” as in the case of fascism. However, populism still retains a core and is restricted by it. Not every politician who believes in serving “the people” is a populist, such as a non-populist nationalist politician who serves the “nation” (generally all of its citizens) but doesn’t separate the citizenry into two classes: the underdog masses and the villainous elite who uproot their will. The nationalist politician may argue that some elites are bad, but that the masses themselves are to be distrusted just as much, and that some form of elitism is required for things to function. And not all elites are non-populists. Many populist leaders enter the halls of power and become elites themselves, but under the belief that they still represent the mass will.
This synthesis of ethnocracy and populism fuses a belief in ethno-nationalism with popular sovereignty, producing a form of illiberal majoritarianism. The DRWP perceives its ethnic majority as under attack by a “liberal-progressive globalist elite and their agenda.” These elite “attack the nation” by eroding a sense of belonging for “their people.” Arguing that the very essence of the existing nation-state structure itself is even undermined by policies of mass immigration and multiculturalism. Often, a larger narrative about the “globalizing progressivization of national cultures” is even invoked, making “the people’s” issues not only local but also global. In response to this, they seek to restore, “re-nationalize,” and “make great again” the nation-state with new “ethno-elites” (as opposed to those “non-ethno” or “ethno-traitorous” elites) who will put its ethnos back into power and control. For them, this retaking of control requires a xenophobic redirection that will reprioritize the nation-state. This takes an inward view of nationalism and pulls away from a “cosmopolitan direction of foreign policy," which is viewed as enforced by supranational entities like the European Union and United Nations. Thus, any palingenetic narratives here are grounded in protecting and attempting to save the existing interstate system from the encroaching “new order cosmopolitanism.”
However, the DRWP is similar enough to the popular image of fascism in common culture that claims of a “fascist resurgence” have flared up. Leading many journalists, activists, and even some academics to reinforce such a claim on flimsy historical and taxonomic grounds. Even 2016 libertarian candidate Gary Johnson famously remarked, “It walks like a duck, quacks like a duck,” in response to the question of whether Trump was a fascist or not. This truism has a common sense-ish kick but a weak backup punch. Putting aside the blatant issues of comparing zoological taxonomy to that of political taxonomy, sometimes when something quacks like a duck, it isn’t a duck. Sometimes it’s a woodfrog quacking. Penguins walk a bit “duckish” too.
To better illustrate the differences between the DRWP and fascism, we will use specific terms for their own conceptions of the national community, explain, and cross-examine them. For the DRWP, we will use ethno-nation, and ultra-nation for fascism. This will allow us to peer deeper into their mythic homes, analyzing and comparing the furnishings.
DRWP’s ethno-Nation is a non-revolutionary national community that is imagined as being formed through a “native ethnie’s” homogenous racial, cultural, gender, and/or religious traditional values, which requires “restored representation” through the removal of the “traitorous elite” and “non-ethnie,” who are viewed as undermining the very existence of the nation-state and its democratic processes.
The broader philosophical trajectory of the recent DRWP is a synthesized mix-match of centrist liberal and extreme right ENR (European New Right) ideas, values, and influences. This unique synthesis results in their position being commonly located on the radical right but not the extreme right in many taxonomic schemes. So, while the DRWP is opposed to the attempts of modern liberal democracies to create a multicultural democracy with a separation of powers by pushing anti-minoritarian legislation and eroding government restraints, the DRWP is pro-democracy in its belief in representative democracy and popular sovereignty. In this way, they give one cheer to Locke and another to Benoist. For example, they would say, “We will preserve our ethno-cultural difference through constitutional rights, representative democracy, and capitalist nation-statism.” If they had a universal chant for their breed of exclusivity, it would be “life, liberty, and the pursuit of likeness.”
The ethno-nation’s nativism has a protean range; it can manifest in outright racially exclusionist and violent actions, as seen in attempts to institutionalize or reinforce the values of a white democratic nationalism, as used in Apartheid South Africa or the Ku Klux Klan movement (excluding its outright fascist cells). It can use historical revisionist language, as exhibited by the broader neo-Confederate movement, to re-envision the Confederacy as solely an attempt to recognize unique historical heritage against federal overreach. Ultimately underplaying or denying the involvement of slavery in the American Civil War. It may also take on more electoral clothing, as seen with the presidential runs of Pat Buchanan and Donald Trump. It can even be expressed in more ethno-religious terms, as seen with Israel and India’s Hindutva (“Hindu-ness”) movement. Which focuses its nativist claims through a politicization of religion.
Fascist ultra-nation is a revolutionary national community that is imagined as being formed through a new rooted order (rooted modernism), which requires “reconnection with the national essence” through the mass mobilization of its “organic members” to dismantle the decadence of existing modernity that is viewed as destroying the nation’s anthropological and temporal properties.
This new order attempts to destroy the existing nation-state system, as Hitler’s Third Reich tried to do in World War II. The ultra-nation’s revolutionary protean range can either be in explicitly biological supremacist terms as seen in Nazism, Ustashism, and Hungarism, or in more culturally ethnic terms as seen in pre-nazified Italian fascism and Brazilian Integralism. It’ll conceive of the ultra-nation’s rebirth as creating a new “thousand-year Reich,” “civilizational state,” “empire,” “ethno-cultural horizon,” etc. It isn’t content with persisting on democratic institutions and vampirically feeding-off liberalism. As fascism views these things as grotesque, unhealthy, and an existential-temporal sickness on the national essence, thus requiring their (and all other alternative political visions) outright removal.
By putting them into comparison, we can see how the fascist ultra-nation is directly opposed to the DRWP’s ethno-nation. The DRWP finds certain liberal or democratic institutions to be an inherently healthy tradition in need of saving from “those people” outside the ethno-nation. Resulting in the DRWP’s “system of freedom for the ethnie and their values” functioning as a tyrannical nightmare for those considered “alien.” This can result in targeted acts of terror and outright genocide. Which can seem indistinguishable from the Holocaust horrors of yesterday but, in actuality, have a better historical parallel with the settler colonial republicanism of yesterday’s yesterday, like early America.
The concepts of “great replacement” or “white genocide” are another great way to show our distinction between the ultra-nation and the ethno-nation. These threats of “encroaching identity erasure” and the advocacies for “fixing the loss of demographic majority” are taken down different routes. The fascist calls for extraordinary revolutionary activities to save the “ultranation” from a permanent “loss of identity” caused by existing modernity. This can be transformed, mutated, and altered by the interests of the DRWP. They can then use this perceived “threat” as not requiring revolution but electoral and legislative actions to “save the identity.” Essentially, the DRWP can take those with bigoted views and deradicalize them away from revolutionary ambitions. This is done to the extent of no longer threatening the system at large but still capable of threatening plenty of lives. One could even see the greater meta-narrative of ethnopluralism as used by the ENR (European New Right) as co-opted by the DRWP. Where the nation-state system is used rather than destroyed to “preserve universal differences” through a new dominant ideology. A useful tool for assimilating some post-war fascists back into the conservative fold. Of course, there will always be those fascists who see through this ploy and maintain their beliefs.
For the DRWP to be approached as a possible member of the fascist genus, it would require an alternative history. Perhaps someplace in the multiverse (of madness), there was an Alt-Mussolini and his “alt-fascist movement,” which had centered themselves on institutional segregation through constitutional republicanism. An alt-world where Mussolini still entered government but never attempted to transform the Italian state into a revolutionary vehicle for a new world. The same strange place where Alt-Mussolini proudly announces, “We marched on Rome to save Italian liberal democracy!” Only in that place would it be historically appropriate to talk of a “rise of fascism” in the face of the DRWP.
(Maybe there you’d also see a tiny alt-Being that’s writing a different version of this essay talking about this universe’s Being. The Being multiverse!)
02: Liberalism makes the house rules!
“If the battle cry of liberalism in theory is Rousseau’s ‘All [human beings] are born equal and everywhere they live in chains’ then its slogan in practice has been Orwell’s ‘All men are equal but some are more equal than others’ (a phrase which is often conveniently identified with the authoritarian ‘other’ rather than ‘our’ own brand of totalitarianism).” — Roger Griffin (Interregnum or endgame? The radical right in the ‘post-fascist’ era) [emphasis added]
The DRWP’s ability to transmute fascist influences swings, arguably, much harder in the liberal direction. Their usage of liberal democratic rhetoric, governance, and ideas is most apparent in the names of many of their parties, such as the Croatian Democratic Union in the 1990s, the Sweden Democrats, the Forum for Democracy in the Netherlands, Likud—the National Liberal Movement, and the Liberal Democratic Party of the Soviet Union (which produced “liberal democratic” offshoots in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Transnistria). The mimicry of liberalism here (albeit a darkened version of it) has been called “ethnocratic liberalism” by Roger Griffin. This is to elucidate that the DRWP’s existence feeds on liberalism to exploit the ambiguities of its political theory and the very concept of democracy itself. The vague concept of a “demos” (“the people’’) can be perverted towards xenophobic ends and an inward exclusivist “ethnos”. Mutating the liberal mission of universal civil society for everyone into “only our people are allowed those natural rights.” It’s able to do this precisely because the concept of “liberal democracy” is a traumatic matrimony with a long history of abuse and horror.
The best way to briefly explain this traumatic matrimony will be to focus on certain historical episodes in the United States. Given that it’s one of the world’s first and oldest continuous liberal states. Particularly those events that exemplify liberal failings. Off the bat, we can point to America’s full enfranchisement of its white male population, as it existed alongside the genocide of native Americans. During this time, President Andrew Jackson employed a liberalism that was both radically inclusive for its time and radically exclusive with respect to today. Jackson’s America is Janus-headed in this regard (as are liberalism’s effects on history in general); one face spoke of the expansion of non-property-owning white male enfranchisement, while the other face signed the death sentence for thousands of Native Americans with the Indian Removal Act.
American liberal hypocrisy had explosive effects on national stability as other issues also continued, notably the slavery debate. The division of free and slave states, north and south, reinforced a significant bifurcation in American culture. The phrase “all men are created equal” increasingly meant two different things. On one side, it was argued that its expansion meant the inclusion of "non-whites,” while on the other, this expansion excluded African slaves, and only the “white man” was considered the constitutional subject of universal rights. This limited universality, an apparent contradiction, will undoubtedly always manifest in liberalism as it mixed with nationalism, particularly nation-statism. Given that liberal nationalism means that those belonging to the “nation” are the “rightful heirs” of universal rights, citizenship, and social dignity, while those “outside the nation” are excluded from these. The culture of the white Antebellum south and the Confederate states of America is a product of this limited universality and more closely anticipates the later development of the DRWP as its ancestor than as some form of “proto-fascism,” as few have argued. Given this history of pre-20th-century white supremacy, it was formed through variants of illiberal conservatism and catalyzed by failures of liberalism.
When the Civil War ended, the US’s official ethnocracy status did too, with the 14th Amendment in 1868. This status had started with the 1790 Naturalization Act; for about three quarters of a century, “all men are created equal” didn’t mean all men. For many, it still didn’t. While ethnocracy was over in an official capacity, this didn’t stop people from trying to re-establish it. The most infamous attempt was the Jim Crow laws, which reinforced racial segregation. Those southern politicians who tried to maintain an ethnic slavocracy (ethnically defined slave society) were forced to settle for a de facto regional ethnocracy. It’s important to also stress that many states outside of the South also had these laws. It’s all too common for many to blame America’s racism on just one region. All in all, what the Jim Crow era meant was “all men are created equal but separate.” Fortunately, this reality didn’t remain; the Civil Rights movement made sure of that. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Act of 1964 and 1965 had once again struck a blow to American ethnocracy. However, systemic racism in the US persists. As the system still finds ways to subordinate, imprison, and make those who “aren’t white” feel less than those who are “white.” Today, the US has straddled itself somewhere between an ethnocracy and a fully multicultural liberal democracy.
(Keep in mind that just because the American state could be better doesn’t mean it would still be without oppression. The anarchism within Being would still scream for resistance in that “perfect and ideal multicultural American state,” given that inequalities are inherent in all states.)
It’s best to put someone in the present, like Donald Trump, in retrospect of this dynamic of constant encroaching attempts to undo civil liberties while they still continue to slowly progress. Before Trump’s 2016 run for president (and his lesser-known run for the 2000 election on the reform party), there were Pat Buchanan’s attempted runs in 1992 and 1996 for the Republican nomination (and also in 2000 for the reform party ticket, coincidentally). Buchanan also ran on a DRWP platform, specifically representing the paleoconservative movement, in an attempt to steer the Republican Party away from the neoconservatism of the Bush senior administration. Before Buchanan, we can then look to George Wallace, who ran for the Democratic ticket in 1964 and then ran for the American Independent Party ticket in 1968, who, as he said himself in his gubernatorial inaugural address in 1963, stood for “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.”
Since the failures of the fascist states in the early 20th century, notably the Third Reich’s attempt to create a world empire through a transcontinental genocide of Jews, Romani, etc., the world system has set a few new house rules, one of which was fascism’s permanent marginalization. This ultimately meant that bigotries like racism were forced to play by the book. So while nazism was kicked from the historical table, certain older bigoted ideologies like white democratic nationalism were never made to leave. This left the political right-wing re-exposed to the influence of perversions of liberalism. Which ultimately means that the DRWP aids liberalism in removing fascist entry into the political mainstream. So while the liberal immune system is vaccinated against revolutionary illiberalism, those mutated cells of non-revolutionary illiberalism that coat themselves in liberal DNA can more easily pass through the bloodstream.
Fascists will still attempt to Trojan horse the DRWP’s parties and broader movements but will find themselves locked in a nightmare of concessions and impotence. A fate shared by those on the far left who try the same strategy with left-wing populist parties. These socialists and fascists share a special room in the nine circles called electoral gradualism. This strategy runs like this: if X politicians have similar-ish ideas, then when they come into power, that will acclimate the political arena more towards the Y extreme. Once this exhausts itself, it can easily turn into crude presentations of lesser evilism: “Even if X politicians have won but the Y never happens, at least the more evil Z isn’t in power.”
Being would place the DRWP as a species of conservative political ideology that, while using “ethnocratic liberalism,” is at its core an attempt to preserve traditionalist hierarchical structures but forced to do so through mutating liberal limitations set by the post-war world. It’s truly a fascinating and odd specimen of illiberal conservatism that could only exist and reproduce in such an ecosystem. However, even this will fail miserably. To the credit (but with a thousand caveats) of liberalism and liberal conservatism, DRWP politicians, for the most part, do not succeed in their mission to turn their states into ethnocracies or even simply illiberal democracies. Given that when they enter the halls of power, the mainstream right, general procedures of government, and center-to-left opposition will usually result in concessions, protracted policy follow-through, and a constant threat of democratic removal. Not to mention the constant controversies they elicit from portions of the general and international public with their bigoted rhetoric and actions. This is notably used to the liberal media’s advantage, where they can use this as fuel for constant news cycles on their antics as a way to try and marginalize them politically. Which is easily used by liberal politicians to make themselves look better by comparison.
(It’s important to note here that there is also a conservative media. Being’s not trying to argue that liberals are the only ideological force with media and press hegemonies or that their negative portrayal of the DRWP is somehow evidence that the DRWP are “actually the good guys.”)
For every successful DRWP politician who managed to stay in power for a while and illiberalize their countries to varying degrees, such as Erdoğan or Orbán, there are also those who, while getting into power, are far less successful in their missions. Recent cases of failures for the DRWP are the presidencies of Trump and Bolsonaro in the United States and Brazil. Who, while passing harmful legislation and spewing hateful rhetoric, ended their single terms (assuming Trump loses in 2024) with instigated last-ditch riots against their nation’s capitals in a futile ploy for one more term. How pathetic is that? You spend four years trying to abuse and rig a liberal constitution and yet the best you could hope for is four more years? Older and grumpy illiberal conservatives cry out, “What happened to those good old days of Franco and Salazar? When an illiberal conservative could hold on for more than merely ‘another term’ before getting pummeled?!” Fascists are the kings of ideological losers, but illiberal conservatives have had plenty of their own failures.
03: The kids can go back outside and play again!
On January 20th, 1991, then-recently inaugurated George H.W. Bush remarked:
“For the first time in this century, for the first time in perhaps all history, man does not have to invent a system by which to live. We don’t have to talk late into the night about which form of government is better. We don’t have to wrest justice from the kings. We only have to summon it from within ourselves. We must act on what we know. I take as my guide the hope of a saint: In crucial things, unity; in important things, diversity; in all things, generosity.”
This overly optimistic outlook anticipated the following near-decade of “not having to talk about politics and ideology.” From December 26, 1991, to September 11, 2001, liberals were dizzy from the fumes of the idea that there’d be no more ideological trouble for them. Capitalism could now go on undisturbed, and the only remaining truth was consumerism. Within the minds of liberalism’s proponents, it was the IKEA nesting decade (a reference to the “IKEA nesting instinct” from the film Fight Club), a time of “nesting” the ensuing, unavoidable liberal utopia on the horizon. In actuality, things couldn’t be more ripe for ideological disaster. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the breakup of Yugoslavia unleashed boiling nationalist sentiments. Islamism continued to be an ideological force, with the first Islamic emirate of Afghanistan establishing itself in 1996 and Al-Qaeda’s (formed in 1988) preparing for the September attacks that would end this near-decade. In which, after the twin tower attacks, many sobered up from their previous illusions of an encroaching Lockean paradise.
The post-Soviet world ultimately meant that the old Yalta agreements, which set up a twin hegemonic world of the US and USSR, were no longer in effect. The US officially lost its hegemonic legitimacy (which had been declining since 1970) and best argument. The larger consequence of this was that liberalism lost its position as the dominant ideological force, and a “post-ideology” era of sorts began. We can think of this as not the end of ideology, but the end of dominant ideologies in the world system. The IKEA nesting decade, in retrospect to all of this, was the decade of self-denial to these conditions.
One of the more pernicious efforts of many within the DRWP is the attempt to “dethrone liberalism” and become the new dominant ideology of the capitalist world system. Taking things in a more illiberal and nationally conservative direction. This would make for an unexpected ending for liberals. The winds of political thought have always told us, in one way or another, that things would end one of two ways: either liberalism wins out, or some revolutionary ideology does, be it from the left with socialism or fascism from the right. Nobody could have seen a third ending—that liberalism’s shortcomings would help to manifest an ideology that would take things over in neither a liberal nor revolutionary direction. However, Being predicts that this won’t be the actual ending, despite the drooling of many DRWP leaders.
This trend of building illiberal states out of the shell of liberal constitutions is part of a much greater effort to reassert national identity. The 21st century crisis of the nation-state project, unlike the 20th century crisis, isn’t coming from an attempt to build a world empire but from a decline in the world system as a whole. National integrity has been unraveling since 89' by three major forces. 1) An increase in extra-territorial virtual imagined communities as produced by global technologies such as the Internet. Which has allowed for associations between peoples to be less and less defined by their present localities. 2) Deplacement of geographical regions through rising sea levels and uninhabitability brought on by climate catastrophe. Resulting in many nations’ disappearing into the depths of the ocean or severe heat, causing an influx of de-placed people (those who’ve been removed from their native lands because they no longer exist) to seek out new homes. Producing a new classification of unplaceable immigrants who physically, and in the most literal sense, cannot be sent back to where they came from. 3) Fragmentation of existing national identities due to people losing faith in larger entities like supranational organizations and larger nations, creating a rise in separatist movements that seek to create more intimate forms of belonging.
As things continue on this path, two roads appear before humanity: the drive towards inward exclusivity, where people are constantly fragmented from each other, or the drive towards the outward expansion of inclusivity, where humans no longer look to nations or international governing bodies for a sense of belonging. Humanity can either accept the growing complexities of its essence through relationships with differing peoples and technologies or continue to squabble over territories that’ll no longer exist.
Honestly, Being prefers the lesbian communist cyber-squid uprising.
Citations and further reading:
- Roger Griffin — Interregnum or endgame? (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/248966473_Interregnum_or_endgame_The_radical_right_in_the_'post-fascist'_era)
- Roger Griffin — Ghostbusting Fascism? (https://brill.com/view/journals/fasc/11/1/article-p59_3.xml?language=en)
- Roger Griffin & Olof Bortz — Fascism: historical phenomenon and political concept (https://www.politika.io/en/notice/fascism-historical-phenomenon-and-political-concept)
- Cas Mudde — Putting Our Own People First (https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/09/29/putting-our-own-people-first-nativism-us-vs-them-far-right-parties-lega-fpo-kkk-europe-usa/)
- Cas Mudde — Populism in the Twenty-First Century (https://amc.sas.upenn.edu/cas-mudde-populism-twenty-first-century)
- George H.W. Bush — Inaugural Address (https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/bush.asp)
- Immanuel Wallerstein — The Curve of American Power (https://iwallerstein.com/wp-content/uploads/docs/NLRCURVE.PDF)