Strikingly, some of the most intense criticisms of alternative historian Darryl Cooper’s appearance on Tucker Carlson come from commentators very sympathetic to populism, including Sohrab Ahmari and Victor Davis Hanson. On a tactical level, this is hardly surprising. Critics of right-populism accuse it of being a stalking horse for fascism or even Nazism. Conservative populists thus have good reason to draw a bright line between themselves and anything that could be interpreted as dismissive of the horrors of Hitler’s regime. (I’ll leave it to VDH and Mark Wright to discuss the historical infelicities of casting Winston Churchill as the chief villain of World War II.)
But I think this goes deeper than mere tactics and tone-policing. The incentives of the Very Online “based” discourse may be fundamentally at odds with building a center-right governing majority, populist or otherwise.
Like Marxist radicals in the Sixties, “based” discourse often uses disgust with American life as proof of authenticity. From this perspective, maximal honesty means asserting maximal brokenness. The foes are legion: corporate America, the “deep state,” feminists, every media outlet, the “forever war” political establishment, schools, “wokes” of all stripes, Big Tech, nonprofits, professional associations, conservative organizations, and your next-door neighbor. They have taken every opportunity from you, and the struggle with them is the essential goal of politics. (Apparently, much of this “struggle” consists of listening to podcasts.)
This is a political branding birthed by alienation and the incentives of the digital media space. However, this vision also seems unlikely to address alienation, let alone forge a majority political coalition. Saying that Nazi rule over France was “infinitely preferable in virtually every way” to the opening ceremony at the Olympics may generate a lot of engagement online but also repels most Americans.
Particularly when weaponized by the incentives of digital engagement, performative alienation is corrosive. It cheers catapulting the baby out with the bathwater — transmogrifying criticism of real faults into a wholesale rejection of contemporary life. It’s logically possible to dismiss contemporary America without thereby endorsing some of the worst regimes of human history. But maintaining that distinction has proven too challenging for many intellectuals, as radical apologetics for Josef Stalin and the Khmer Rouge indicate. Holding that every institution in American life is absolutely corrupted is itself a great indictment of America and thus a poor basis for any project of national renewal.
Affection rather than disgust is a stronger foundation for a “realigned,” more populist right: that we have inherited a great nation, and we need to rise to the challenge of preserving that Republic for this and future generations. That requires strengthening American families and rebuilding the nation’s industrial infrastructure. This kind of political vision is compatible with a range of populist policies, from regaining control of the border to doing more for working families. But it also means affirming American life and not tossing our national inheritance into the bonfire of trollery.