Conservative intellectuals at a turning point
By Anne Applebaum
July 19 at 11:06 AM
In the short span of a few days, two very different events unfolded that will, together, shape American politics for the next decade. At a rally in Greenville, N.C., the president of the United States, though he later tried to deny it, egged on a crowd to chant “send her back,” echoing not only his own racist tweets from a few days earlier, but also the language of American nativists down the decades. From the 19th-century movements that sought to send emancipated slaves back to Africa to the anti-Catholic “Know Nothing” party and the Ku Klux Klan, the notion that only certain kinds of Americans are “real Americans” is one that we have heard many times and know very well.
“Send her back” also chimes beautifully with the modern language of the European far right, especially the Identitarians, a conspiracy network that believes in the existence of a secret plot, organized by Jews, to replace white Europeans with brown ones. The group, which assiduously seeks to gain followers in the United States, calls repeatedly for “remigration” — in other words, “send them back” — and promotes the idea online whenever it can. Some of Trump’s followers surely recognize those ideas even if they don’t know where they come from. Already those ideas appeal to an extremist fringe: Both the synagogue shooters in the United States and the mosque shooter in New Zealand were inspired by them.
Many miles away from the Greenville rally, a group of intellectuals met in a ballroom in Washington. These were “national conservatives,” thinkers and writers who are trying, in the wake of the president’s destruction of American conservatism as we know it, to build something new in its place. This is not an easy task ...
... Tucker Carlson <used> his moment on the podium to dismiss the problem of racism as boring. (“It can’t be fixed; it can’t be changed.”) One or two of the speakers are already established fellow travelers, active participants in the whitewashing of authoritarian nationalism in Europe. Hazony’s .. book in praise of nationalism contains a bizarre and ahistorical description of the formation of nations: groups of families, clans or tribes that came together in some mythical pre-modern era and decided to be unified — a definition that .. clearly excludes .. pretty much every .. modern nation-state ...
... Americans have proved that they can be loyal to, and will fight on behalf of, a more complex, more cerebral national ideal, one derived from ideas of democracy and justice as opposed to blood and soil. By contrast, those who promote a narrower, nativist definition of America will weaken and divide us, as the president is already doing. They will teach us to hate one another and lose us the respect we once had abroad ...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/conservative-intellectuals-are-at-a-turning-point-normalize-trump-or-resist-him/2019/07/19/25e5b06e-a978-11e9-86dd-d7f0e60391e9_story.html?utm_term=.cc0949b9d1a9
= new reply since forum marked as read
OMG that is hilarious!
but without pictures this thread is worthless.
