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the American alt-right, the European far right, and Vox all messaging the same thing, at the same time, in multiple languages, attempting to create the same emotions across Europe, North America, and beyond.
Speaker after speaker—American, Italian, French, Dutch, British, Polish, Spanish (an MEP from Vox)—got up and described feelings of political persecution, as well as the experience of being a dissident in a world dominated by a set of ideas variously described as “left,” “progressive,” “enlightenment rational liberal,” or even “totalitarian.”
Although several speakers had talked about oppressive left-wing ideology at universities, Hungary is the only European country to have shut down an entire university, to have put academic bodies such as the Hungarian Academy of Sciences under direct government control, and to have removed funding from university departments that the ruling party dislikes for political reasons. Although many objected to
“left-wing” media, Hungary is also the only European country that has used a combination of political and financial pressure to put most of the private and public media under ruling-party control too.
their beloved classical authors taught them that history was circular, that human nature was flawed, and that special measures were needed to prevent democracy from sliding back into tyranny. But
what really made American patriotism unique, both then and later, was the fact it was never explicitly connected to a single ethnic identity with a single origin
Reagan called on Americans to unify not around blood and soil but around the Constitution:
there have always been groups whose dislike of American ideals ran very deep, reflecting more than mere exhaustion with the government of the day.
In the past century and a half, the most despairing, the most apocalyptic visions of American civilization
usually came from the left.
institutions: “A free Republic! How a myth will maintain itself, how it will continue to deceive, to dupe, and blind even the comparatively intelligent to its monstrous absurdities.”
the Christian right located its disappointment in what it perceived as the moral depravity, the decadence, the racial mixing, and above all the irreversible secularism of modern
America.
a part of the evangelical community now genuinely believes that America is lost.
Patrick Buchanan. Buchanan is not an evangelical Protestant, but rather a Catholic who shares the same apocalyptic worldview.
If everybody is corrupt and always has been, then whatever it takes to win is okay.
This form of moral equivalence—the belief that democracy is no different, at base, from autocracy—is a familiar argument, and
“To destroy a society,” she wrote, “it is first necessary to delegitimize its basic institutions.”
beneath the surface of the American consensus, the belief in our founding fathers and the faith in our ideals, there lies another America—Buchanan’s America, Trump’s America—one that sees no important distinction between democracy and dictatorship.
The events of 9/11 probably held the group together for far longer than would have otherwise been the case.
America is doomed, Europe is doomed, Western civilization is doomed. Immigration, political correctness, transgenderism, the culture, the establishment, the left, the “Dems” are responsible. Some
You have to shout if
you want to convince yourself as well as others. You have to exaggerate your feelings if you are to make them believable.
Those who maintained Dreyfus’s guilt were the alt-right—or the
Law and Justice Party, or the National Front, or indeed the QAnon cultists—of their time.
Dreyfus was not a spy. To prove that he was, the anti-Dreyfusards had to disparage evidence, law, justice, and even rational thought.
they eventually attacked science itself,
They too were patriots, but of a different sort. They conceived of the nation not as an ethnic clan but as the embodiment
of a set of ideals: justice, honesty, objectivity, the neutrality of the courts.
the spirit of the clercs who sought to smear Dreyfus, to join Vichy, and to fight for France First lives on.
pitted against Emmanuel Macron’s broader vision of a Republican France that still stands for a set of abstract values, among them impartial justice and the rule of law.
