THE POLITICS OF HATE GO MAINSTREAM IN THE GOP

Charlie Sykes: “You can try to overturn an election, you can hang out with white nationalists, you can speculate about Jewish space lasers and you are a member in good standing in the Republican Party? Not only are you not punished for that, you actually become a rockstar.”

When J.D. Vance’s book “Hillbilly elegy” came out, he was lauded by the “coastal elites” as the “hillbilly whisperer,” the man who had come from that “American Rust” milieu and made it out all the way to a Harvard Juris Doctor degree and work on Wall Street, without forgetting his roots. Hollywood even made a (largely forgettable) movie from the book, directed by Ron Howard and starring no less than Merle Streep as “Meemaw.”

In the runup to the 2016 election, Vance was an outspoken critic of Donald Trump's candidacy. "I find him reprehensible," he tweeted a month before the election. "Fellow Christians, everyone is watching us when we apologize for this man."

By 2019, he’d changed his mind. The first public display came when he took the stage at the first "National Conservatism Conference" in July 2019, an event widely viewed as an attempt by right-wing pundits and scholars to erect an intellectual scaffolding around Donald Trump and his takeover of the Republican Party. Vance was among those lauding Trump for remembering “the forgotten America.” When he decided to run for the Senate seat being vacated by the retirement of Rob Portman, Vance’s first item of business was to apologize to Ohio voters for having been "wrong about the guy."

He’s continued to evolve, but it was only at the end of August that the full impact of his spiritual and political reversal become apparent, when he gave an interview to The American Conservative magazine, in which he said: "I think our people hate the right people."

For Vance, "Our people" might be broadly identified as the Republican base, while those he believes are worthy of “hate” are the leftists and members of the coastal elites who originally recognized him as a spokesman for Appalachia. When reporters questioned his campaign, his press secretary stated that "J.D. Vance strongly believes that the political, financial and Big Tech elites…deserve nothing but our scorn and hatred."

In so doing, Vance has recognized, engaged with and now gone along with a powerful political current that has recently resurfaced within the conservative movement. The right is now choosing illiberalism.

At the very core of this new illiberal conservatism is a desire for power, expressed as an unabashed willingness to use political power to destroy one's opponents. A demands like this can be plausibly justified only if one's adversaries are irredeemable and one's life itself is at stake. The online chatter of these “new” conservatives claims that “the left” wishes to "subjugate" or "exterminate" them; that progressives will use state power to accomplish their ends; that doing anything less than respond "in kind" amounts to "unilateral disarmament"; that this is a "war" in which the only choices are "suicide" or victory at any cost.

This is not limited to the dark edges of social media. In July, former Trump Administration official (and "Flight 93 Election" essayist) Michael Anton strongly criticized conservatives for not responding appropriately to the "proto-genocidal rhetoric" of the left. In February 2020, Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule tweeted that the anti-Trump conservative attendees of a center-right conference would be "the very first group for the camps." He later “clarified” that he meant their opposition to Trump will not be able to save them from the "gulags" when the "extremist left" takes over.

This is not a left-right schism. For the "Will-to-Power Conservatives," the fusionist right is no less an enemy than is the progressive-identitarian left.

The idea that people can disagree without despising each other is not a feature of this “new conservatism.” In this milieu, hatred of the enemy is a prerequisite for membership. Once hate becomes a virtue to be celebrated and opponents become enemies to be destroyed, one soon arrives at the point where no response is off the table.

The new illiberal conservatives have taken up the views of Carl Schmitt, an anti-modernist, pro-authoritarian German political philosopher known for insisting that the core distinction of politics "is that between friend and enemy." Schmitt's beliefs led him to a position as “the crown jurist of the Third Reich." Though he eventually left the Nazis, he refused to renounce the worldview that made him one of Hitler's most prominent apologists.

While criminal violence is a problem, the kind of violence Republicans are now flirting with or sometimes outright endorsing to the point it is becoming expected with some leaders and thus “mainstram” in the party, is political violence. This is a completely different plane of threat.

Kyle Rittenhouse, an poorly-parented teenager who decided to cross state lines from his home in Illinois to Wisconsin, and obtained an AR-15 illegally with the help of a friend, in order to shoot and kill two people and wound one at a Kenosha, Wisconsin, riot has been lionized by the GOP and turned into a hero, rather than a murderer. Not only that, his mother - who obviously failed in her job as a mother - received a standing ovation at an event to raise funds for her son’s defense in Waukesha. Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed attempting to assault the chamber of the House of Representatives, has become a martyr for the new Right in the way Horst Wessel was made a hero and martyr by Josef Goebbels for the Nazis. Former Texas Republican chair Allen West, who resigned his commission from the Army in the face of pending war crimes court-martial charges for his actions in Iraq, speaks approvingly of secession and is applauded for do so. Former National Security Adviser, convicted liar, and Trump confidant Michael Flynn has advocated for a Myanmar-style military coup. The idea of political violence now finds approval and support from 28 percent of Republicans, who respond affirmatively in a recent poll to the proposition that "because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country.”

Violence or the threat of violence is spreading through the anti-mask/anti-vaxx movement that finds its strongest supporters in this part of the Right. Not only are these people protesting rules that apply to them, they have attempted several times - including in liberal Los Angeles this past spring - to prevent others from getting vaccinated by shutting down vaccination clinics with threats of violence. Because their rights include their right to force others to submit to their supremacy.

This past Thursday, in Mesquite, Arizona, three men entered the Mesquite Elementary School carrying zip ties, and confronted the school principal over a call to one of the men to inform him his child had tested positive for Coronavirus along with six others who had been exposed, and should stay home in quarantine. The parent, backed up by his two accomplices, threatened to call local authorities and conduct a “citizen’s arrest” if the student was not allowed to return to classes immediately. The principal explained that the school was following guidance issued by the local health department, and ordered the three intruders to leave, then called the police, at which point they left. The principal, Diane Vargo, has since shared some of the hundreds of death threats she received after the incident made the local news. Here’s one:

“Next time it will be a barrel pointed at your Nazi face. Following the guidance, you say? The Nazis were just following orders, too. Guess we will have to see what side you choose, the Americans or the Nazis. Remember, Tucson is a small community and you have a target on your back for enforcing unlawful orders.”

Kelly Walker, one of the two men who accompanied the parent in the confrontation and live-streamed the attempted “citizens arrest,” compared the elementary school invasion to Rosa Parks’ struggle for equal rights. He is well known in right-wing culture in Tucson, where he co-owns a coffee shop in Tucson with his wife and in-laws that describes itself as “Tucson’s hub of Freedom and delicious coffee.” Walker recently hosted a meet-and-greet with far-right convicted felon (pardoned by Trump) Dinesh D’Souza. Next month, he’s announced he will welcome Matthew Lohmeier, a disgraced Space Force Lt. Colonel who was relieved of his post this past May after it was discovered he had self- published a book warning of an impending “white genocide.”

This event in Arizona is yet another incident of radicalized parents protesting pandemic mandates as cases tied to the highly-transmissible delta variant surge due to the failure to act by Republican office-holders. Some of these radicals have made physical threats against both teachers and students. When schools began opening in Texas last month, one parent ripped a teacher’s mask off her face while other parents in that same district yelled at a teacher who was wearing a mask, claiming her doing so made it hard for them to understand what she was saying (the fact she was probably speaking English using polysyllabic words likely contributed to their lack of comprehension). Days later, a father in Florida was charged with assault after a student confronted him about coming onto school property not wearing a mask and taking pictures of students. In California (in the long-time crazy house known here as “Orangatang County”) a male parent came to a school, where he went on an anti-mask tirade and finished by assaulting a teacher seriously enough that she wound up in the hospital. He now faces felony assault charges.

The talk of being “oppressed” by “Nazis” has become mainstream on the Right, with professional inciters like Marjorie Taylor Green saying “"You know, we can look back at a time in history where people were told to wear a gold star, and they were definitely treated like second class citizens, so much so that they were put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany, And this is exactly the type of abuse that Nancy Pelosi is talking about."

What’s important to understand is that these are not random events. This is the stuff in the air that’s congealing into action.

We shouldn’t overstate the danger - this involves around a third of the “base” of a party that only represents some 30 percent of the national population, but that 10 percent does come out to around 30 million people, so it’s definitely not nothing, and with the speed at which the Republican Party is radicalizing and promoting the politics of hatred, the percentage of the Republican base that supports this is rising even now. The promoters of this dangerous situation, who can be found weekday evenings on Fox News (where they are all vaccinated by order of Rupert Murdoch if they want to remain employees there) are pouring political gasoline and dropping rhetorical matches, with such outrageous talk being taken seriously by their viewers. Yes, I am in favor of deporting Rupert Murdoch to Australia as the “threat to national security” he is.

But with their talk of enemies and enmity and civilizational war, the new illiberal conservative “nationalists” have tapped into something that isn't so new after all.

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