Who would have thought the heady mix of nationalism and populism would stumble on race?
Who would have thought the heady mix of nationalism and populism would stumble on race?
A ndrew Roberts’s magisterial The Storm of War ends with a chapter of pure analysis on the basic question of why the Allies won and the Axis lost the Second World War. The last line of the chapter and thus the book puts a fine point on things. Hitler lost the war, Roberts writes, because he was a Nazi.
This isn’t Roberts falling for the progressive fantasy that the only true things are the desirable ones, that success proceeds nomically from having just opinions and failure from having unjust ones. He isn’t virtue signaling, or even being Whiggish. Rather, he is saying that Hitler and by extension the Reich were wedded to a Nazi ideology that was, in the end, dumb. The man wrote it all down in Mein Kampf, a theory of victory that required immoral ends but, more to the point, actively idiotic means — a reality that set in sometime between Stalingrad and the Führerbunker.
Unrelatedly, the nationalist populists are months into the tedious and time-consuming work of figuring out exactly which races are welcome in the movement, which must be relegated to associate status, and which must be excluded altogether.
The latest plenary session has to do with Indian Americans. The “Indian Question” — as a not squeamish but nevertheless squirmy video exchange between Chris Rufo and Jonathan Keeperman recently called it — has been percolating for some time but was brought to the floor as a privileged motion after a political candidate in Texas commented negatively on a picture of South Asian students celebrating at a UT football game. In the video, Keeperman explains that it all comes down to an “intuitional preference”: many people, he says, simply prefer to live in a homogeneous society the way some prefer Sauvignon to Chablis, and they owe no one a reason.
There followed even sillier things involving the family of a Texas congressman. Representative Brandon Gill, a freshman who shops the usual mix of mass deportation and deep reductions of legal immigration, had already been skewered for featuring a picture of his children in a post about wanting them to “grow up in a country they recognize”, but not their mother: Danielle D’Souza Gill, daughter of the Indian-born, Portuguese-surnamed Dinesh D’Souza. A week after the UT episode, Gill called the leftist doofus Hasan Piker “the poster child for why we need to end birth tourism.” Piker rejoined, simply: “your wife is indian.” D’Souza weighed in in his daughter’s defense, conceding the worst premises of both litigants: “She’s Christian, born in America and her mom is white.”
This all unfolded in a multiethnic natcon milieu that is very comfortable speaking in slurs as a signal of their brash truth-telling, and at one point roped in Senator Ted Cruz to finger-wag at an Asian-American conservative influencer who had bandied about a few choice anti-Indian ones. Richard Hanania, himself a racist from way back and so well placed to comment, offered this — incredibly — fair summary of the discourse in question: “A Cuban Republican Senator attacking a Chinese populist for her open racism against Indians, in a controversy about a white anti-Indian Congressman married to an Indian woman, whose dad says she is fully American because she’s half white.”
Yep.
The whole “Indian Question” was itself a rehash of a parallel, long-running session in this set that had to do with the — well, with the Jewish Question.
The discussion over the fate of the Jews in the movement emerged first in response, or perhaps in triage, to the spike in antisemitism on the New Right in the wake of October 7. The problem was that the new skepticism toward Israel and the Jews was happening in a coalition a not insignificant number of which were not just Jewish, but Zionist, and not just Zionists but theoreticians and evangelizers of Israeli ultranationalism while also somehow being theoreticians and evangelizers of American ultranationalism. Some of these people were, in other words, Yoram Hazony.
Hazony’s attempt to square the circle — notably in his interview with Ross Douthat at his Interesting Times podcast, where Douthat specialized in steadily feeding rope to men standing on gallows — was instructively clunky. By clunky I mean two things: One, it wasn’t very persuasive. But two, it was perhaps unintentionally transparent in the coalition management work it was trying to achieve. Hazony too proceeded to validate many of the antisemites’ premises: Empathizing with the notion that Jews will always be tempting targets because they have “a lot more influence than their numbers suggest, which is annoying”; protesting far too much that the young right’s hostility had almost nothing to do with Gaza; apologizing that the new MAGA staffers mostly knew the wrong kinds of Jews and hadn’t spent enough time around the right kinds; and soothingly assuring listeners that the solution to the unpleasantness resided in the singular person of Donald Trump, whose great gift was honoring every faction of his coalition.
One hard-left critic pointed out, correctly, that the natcon gatherings Hazony convened had long traded in starter-kit Jewish conspiracies involving George Soros and sundry other rootless globalist elites, and concluded that Hazony had bet a 21st-century nationalism could borrow the useful political-organizational forms of the old antisemitism without inheriting its content.
That turned out to be a bad bet. A few months after the Douthat interview, in a speech to an antisemitism conference in Jerusalem, Hazony pronounced the campaign to push Tucker Carlson out of the trust circle “a total failure.” He blamed Carlson’s Jewish and Zionist critics for being poor persuaders.
Across the natcon firmament the theory is that the high-test raw material of nationalism could be handled delicately, like a lumbering diesel truck full of nitro creeping across an old wooden bridge.
In pursuit of that goal, every allowance has been given, every caveat ceded: the velocity of immigration is a problem in itself. Not all immigrant populations are alike. Assimilation is crucial and it’s not just about football and backyard barbecue, but about the load-bearing moral and political institutions of the republic. These are all credible points but, in the end, none were enough to satiate the race-sized hole in nationalist-populism.
Another committed racist, Nick Fuentes — who has called Usha Vance bad names and her husband a race traitor — delivered on his show a spot-on critique of these humiliations and contortions:
Dinesh is defending his daughter, his grandchildren, his son-in-law from these racist attacks. . . . And Dinesh D’Souza says, hey, man, I’m Christian and my daughter is half white. That’s his defense against the white nativists. He’s saying, don’t hate my daughter for being Indian. She’s only half Indian. . . . She’s Christian. She’s okay. And her children are going to be less Indian than even she was. And I’m thinking, this is sad. . . . J.D. [Vance] has to go on these interviews and explain how he thinks his wife is going to hell and basically explain away why he doesn’t totally own everything that she’s about. And Brandon Gill and his father-in-law are going to have to explain why the wife, the daughter, is not really all that Indian . . . They’re going to have to betray even the people that they love, their own family, to try to pander to the far right. . . . They’re trying so hard to be everything to everybody, trying to make everybody happy, trying to make the Jews happy and the anti-Semites, trying to make Mark Levin and the Republican Jewish Coalition happy and make Tucker and Candace Owens happy. Trying to make the racists happy and trying to make the Indians happy.
The devil’s due here is that you cannot run a racialist politics that relies on negotiating a series of ad hoc exceptions for your wife, your kids, or some of the “good ones.”
Like every political pathology on the right, it has its counterpart on the Left. Look no further than Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of the 1619 Project, and her recent essay regretting her decision to send her daughter to a failing school as a stand against segregation. On This American Life, Hannah-Jones recounted recoiling at mention of a “predominantly white institution” when Najya, now 16, floated Harvard as a potential college destination.
The irony is that Hannah-Jones, with a Czech-English Catholic mother and a Black father, is almost certainly a predominantly white institution herself. As with the heritage-American crowd, the people who care most about these categories often can’t pass their own purity tests.
The point of my opener isn’t to compare the new right to Nazis. I think everyone understands that any utility such comparisons have is greatly overshadowed by both their exaggeration and their triteness. Rather it’s to make the more obvious point that ideology imposes constraints on strategy and tactics, and those constraints often enough doom those ideologies.
A movement that tells its voters their lower instincts are legitimate, even noble, has no principled ground to draw fine lines. Populist nationalism is a machete, not a scalpel. And the natcons’ institutional leaders are losing control of the Indian Question for the simplest of reasons: They are natcons.