During my visit to Washington DC, last week I came face to face with the corrosive influence of white identity politics. The invention of white identity and its politicisation have until recently been the accomplishment of a tiny group of confused grievance obsessive fantasist who were confined to the margins of public life. However, during the past 2-3 years support for white identity politics has flourished due to its reinvention as a youth oriented online subculture that impatiently feeds of disenchantment with mainstream American conservatism.
The most well-known and talked about representative of on-line white nationalist is Nick Fuentes. Known for his ‘America First’ podcast, his brand of unapologetic racism and synthesis of vile antisemitic conspiracy theory and Christian nationalism has gained influence with young conservatives who are dissatisfied with the direction of mainstream conservative politics. Fuentes personifies that heady mixture of in-your face transgressive youth subculture and self-consciously infantilised demagoguery that the contemporary de-moralised adult-world finds difficult to comprehend.
When Fuentes playfully remarked that Hitler is ‘really fucking cool’ and recited some of the most disgusting anti-Jewish conspiracy far too many individuals in an around the different MAGA and Republican institutions simply ignored his remarks. They took the view that it was not their business to challenge him.
In the meantime, Fuentes’ primitive version of white grievance identity politics has been embraced by numerous under 30, young activists working in the Washington DC right-wing bubble. When you talk to some of these immature Fuentes fans it becomes evident that they have clearly imbibed in what is best described as a grotesque caricature of identity politics. Think of Black Lives Matter, Islamist Jihadism, Intersectional Feminism and Trans ideology. Now reverse this synthesis of hysterical victim consciousness and you have a desperately sad version of an intellectually illiterate story of white nationalism.
Fuentes’ playful and infantile communication style is expressed through his embrace of an on-line meme culture. His army of supporters, called the Groyper movement can best be understood as a right-wing youth subculture consisting of on-line warriors who sometimes use the groyper cartoon ( of a grotesque toad) as an avatar to promote their image as serious, hard core but cool fighters for the cause of white nationalism.
The digital bed-room has become the safe space where Groyper fantasists can act out and flourish.
Fuentes and his followers in the Groypers movement self-consciously target more traditional conservative organisations, including the heterogenous coalition supporting Donald Trump. The Groyper tactic of disrupting mainstream conservative and pro-Trump networks has proved remarkably successful in polarising the MAGA movement.
As the Financial Times reported the Maga coalition risk fracturing over an interview that Nick Fuentes recently gave on the Tucker Carlson show[i]. During the course of the interview Fuentes repeated his concern with the role of ‘organized Jewry’ in America and stated that he was an admirer of Joseph Stalin. The jovial manner with which Carlson treated his guest indicated that here are two soul-mates taking pleasure in normalising views that were until recently regarded as the ravings of far-right nutters.
Many leading members of Maga – including the head of the Heritage Foundation – have found it difficult to know how to react to Carlson’s cultivation of a white nationalist political outlook. Under pressure the head of Heritage Foundation – Kevin Roberts – buckled and defended Tucker’s exchange with Fuentes. He later apologized for his response but the damage had been done. Other conservatives were taken aback by what appeared as Roberts’ appeasement of Tucker and Fuentes and told me that they feared that white nationalism is likely to gain momentum at the expense of the mainstream Maga movement. Whether they are right or not remains to be seen.
A major triumph for woke identity politics
During the course of my discussion with supporters of Fuentes it became evident to me that my interlocutors were the unconscious inheritors of the latest version of western identity politics. The contemporary version of white nationalism is founded on the sensibility of unbounded grievance. They perceive themselves as put upon white Christian men who have been systematically victimized by a political order that structurally discriminates against them. They uphold a narrative of reverse victimhood – a mirror of woke complaints about the structural oppression they face. To the feminist and the anti-racist rhetoric of intersectionality they counterpose a white nationalist version of a hierarchy of oppression.
The ideological construct of the Groypers is the mirror image of the outlook cultivated by the cultural elites that they supposedly despise. It is as simplistically crude as responding to the mantra ‘Black Lives Matter’ with the statement ‘White Lives Matter’!
Fuentes personifies the dictates of the narrative of reverse oppression to the point that he embraces the identity that his opponents assign to their enemies. So, his response to the accusation of toxic masculinity is the ridiculous claim that some women want to be raped. His response to the charge of racism is to unapologetically embrace this prejudice
Although they present themselves as enemies of woke identity politics, the supporters of Fuentes have unconsciously internalized the foundational outlook of their sworn enemy. The Groyper movement has borrowed the language of traditional identity politics. They use a similar rhetorical framework of grievance and victimhood, which they repurpose through the idiom of white nationalism. Despite their rejection of the identity politics of the left they have quietly adopted an alternative form of identity politics. Groyper’s advocacy of Christianity has little to do with a quest for spirituality but with an attempt to bolster white identity. Their transformation of Christianity from a religion to a politicized identity is motivated by the objective of creating their very own counterculture.
The Groypers are the product of a zeitgeist that is uniquely hospitable to the universalization of identity politics across the political spectrum. That is why they have more in common with the identity crusaders of the woke left or the Islamist jihadist identity movement gaining ground in the West than they suspect. What these three outwardly different identity movements have in common is a rejection of the civilizational accomplishment of the West. The convergence of their anti-civilizational sensibility is most clearly expressed through their common hostility to the existence of Israel.
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of ‘slave resentment’ captures the spirit that animates the contemporary movement of white nationalists. As Nietzsche noted the ‘slave revolt in morality’ is based on a simplistic inversion of values – a kind of ‘no-saying morality’. Unlike the slave morality discussed by Nietzsche what we have today is a form of a double inversion. Woke identity is an inversion based on the slave resentment of the values of Western civilization. White nationalism is an inversion of a pre-existing inversion and even more lacking in moral clarity than its predecessor.
[i] https://www.ft.com/content/17fc151e-a2f2-47f5-b5f2-329894182eba
I have only be listened to snippets but am horrified that the ignorant and crass four, Carlson, Fuentes, Owens, Tate have captured young people. I would put Piers Morgan there too. They express ignorance which in Carlson’s case is inexcusable. The Jew hating is appalling and they become the National Socialists/communists and embrace the barbaric savagery of Islam which should be called out. Thank you for doing so.
Rowan Dean did a great editorial piece on Outsiders on Sunday on this.
One question has JD Vance embraced the edges of this? He has said some worrying things.