That is certainly my takeaway from the essay by the NYT columnist David Brooks in The Atlantic. Some excerpts, with interspersed commentary:
The first great project of the national conservatives is to man the barricades in the culture war. These people have certainly done their homework when it comes to cultural Marxism [sic]—how the left has learned to dominate culture and how the right now needs to copy their techniques. If I’d had to drink a shot every time some speaker cited Herbert Marcuse or Antonio Gramsci, I’d be dead of alcohol poisoning....
On the other hand, if he had to drink a shot for each person there who had actually read Marcuse or Gramsci, he would be a teetotaler.
The first interesting debate among the NatCons is philosophical: Should we fight to preserve the classical-liberal order or is it necessary to abandon it?
Funny, the Germans had that "philosophical debate" in the early 1930s, and it wasn't merely "philosophical."
Some of the speakers at the conference were in fact classical liberals, who believe in free speech, intellectual debate, and neutral government. Glenn Loury gave an impassioned speech against cancel culture, the illiberal left, and the hyper-racialized group consciousness that divides people into opposing racial camps. Loury asserted that as a Black man he is the proud inheritor of the great Western tradition: “Tolstoy is mine! Dickens is mine! Milton, Marx, and Einstein are mine!”....
But others argued that this sort of liberalism is a luxury we cannot afford.
I'd love to know who the "we" is that can't afford the "luxury" [sic].
The country is under assault from a Marxist oligarchy that wants to impose its own pseudo-religious doctrine. If you try to repulse that with pallid liberalism, with weak calls for free speech and tolerance, you’ll end up getting run over by those who possess fanatical zeal, economic power, and cultural might.
Yoram Hazony, the chief intellectual architect of national conservatism, is an Orthodox Jew who went to Princeton before moving to Israel. He argues that you can’t have a society that embraces government neutrality and tries to relegate values to the private sphere. The public realm eventually eviscerates private values, especially when public communication is controlled by a small oligarchic elite. If conservatives want to stand up to the pseudo-religion of wokeism, they have to put traditional religion at the center of their political project.
The only difference between this guy and your standard-issue fascist is that he doesn't think the "oligarchic elite" is made up of Jews.
Another Israeli political philosopher at the conference, Ofir Haivry, argued that Americans shouldn’t delude themselves into thinking that a nation is built out of high-minded liberal abstractions, like the Bill of Rights. A nation is, instead, a cultural tradition, a common language, a set of rituals and beliefs, and a religious order—a collective cultural identity.
I'm surprised Haivry restrained himself enough not to mention that a nation also requires enemies.
The history of Judaism demonstrates, Haivry argues, that you don’t need a state or a political order to be a nation. For his part, Hazony argued that the American cultural identity is Christian—and has to be if it is not going to succumb to the woke onslaught. If 80 percent of Americans are Christian, Hazony reasoned, then Christian values should dominate. “Majority cultures have the right to establish the ruling culture, and minority cultures have the right to be decently treated,” he said. “To take the minority view and say the minority has the ability to stamp out the views of the majority—that seems to me to be completely crazy.”
The problem in America, Hazony continued, is that LGBTQ activists today, like American Jews in the 1950s, are trying to expel Christianity from the public square. This threatens to render the public square spiritually naked. Wan liberalism collapses in the face of left-wing cultural Marxism. “Eliminating God and scripture in the schools … was the turning point in American civilization,” Hazony said. “Above all else we’ve got to get God and scripture back in the schools.”
I do wish Hazony would save his theocratic fantasies for his homeland, and not try to export them. Fortunately, the Jewish apologists for fascism were joined by their counterparts among the Christians:
My old friend Rod Dreher of The American Conservative argued that because the left controls the commanding heights of the culture and the economy, the only institution the right has a shot at influencing is the state. In these circumstances the right has to use state power to promote its values. “We need to quit being satisfied with owning the libs, and save our country,” Dreher said. “We need to unapologetically embrace the use of state power.”
Fascists should never apologize for the use of state power to quelch their enemies, that seems right.
This is where Viktor Orbán comes in. It was Dreher who prompted Carlson’s controversial trip to Hungary last summer, and Hungarians were a strong presence at the National Conservatism Conference. Orbán, in Dreher’s view, understands the civilizational stakes of the culture war; he has, for instance, used the power of the state to limit how much transgenderism can be taught to children in schools. “Our team talks incessantly about how horrible wokeness is,” Dreher said at the conference. “Orbán actually does something about it.”
Orban is a fascist, by the way, not quite of Hitler proportions, yet anyway: more subtle, after all, since to be less subtle now could cost Hungary a lot of EU money. But the U.S. doesn't need EU money, so that's hopeful! Now a retort from the reasonable Mr. Brooks:
The NatCons are wrong to think there is a unified thing called “the left” that hates America. This is just the apocalyptic menace many of them had to invent in order to justify their decision to vote for Donald Trump.
It goes much deeper than that: there is a kind of pathological paranoia at work here. This movement is a magnet for the malevolently sick--Trump being the most obvious example, the others merely keeping it better wrapped in religious piety.
Finally, there is something extremely off-putting about the NatCon public pose. In person, as I say, I find many of them charming, warm, and friendly. But their public posture is dominated by the psychology of threat and menace. If there was one expression of sympathy, kindness, or grace uttered from the podium in Orlando, I did not hear it. But I did hear callousness, invocations of combat, and whiffs of brutality.
"Callousness, invocations of combat, and whiffs of brutality": that's because Mr. Brooks, these people are fascists. Look at Umberto Eco's 13 characteristics of "Eternal" or "Ur Facism." It's all on display in Mr. Brooks's revealing account of what now counts as "conservatism."
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