Sex! Jack Boots! Trump! by: Diana West
http://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/3130/Sex-Jack-Boots-Trump.aspx
Their frustration is palpable. All those sparkling, witty gambits by conservative pundits to denigrate Trump supporters — as, for example, when National Review’s Kevin Williamson wrote in a column that Trump supporters are “engaged in the political version of masturbation: sterile, fruitless self-indulgence” — has earned little more than approbation from their own kind — as when Commentary’s Noah Rothman, for example, responded with equally sparkling wit: “Man. This piece. @KevinNR grabs Trump supporters by the … well, you know.”
Do they ever. But no matter how many conservative websites take the dirty thang forward — “Donald Trump Is Porn for Nativists” The Federalist recently declared — Trump’s support continues to rise.
And that’s what’s so frustrating for these gentleman-pundits. Unable to reckon with Trump — namely, with his unique ability to bring the crisis of the immigration invasion to national attention, giving last-ditch hope to many that he is a man who will actually do something about it — their strangely, sexually framed hostility has proved to be (borrowing from their thesaurus) impotent.
Could this be how the elite’s New Man, from metrosexual to Girly Man, reacts on confronting the unreconstructed, un-focus-grouped leadership style of Donald Trump? This notion began to cross my mind even before I read a piece by Kent G. Bailey, professor emeritus of clinical psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University, who writes at WND.com that Trump takes “primal maleness to levels unseen for at least half a century. The everyday people of America long for strong warrior male leadership of the kind that has sustained the human race from the dawn of time.”
Dawn of time, huh? Maybe that takes us closer to the explanation behind the quite amazing fact, according to the New York Times, that in poll after poll, Trump leads the GOP candidates among women.
But brave new territory beckons punditry’s best and brightest. The anti-Trump Left calls it “racism,” and has staked out the the South to tar Trump supporters. The anti-Trump Right is talking “nativism,” “white identity politics,” and is taking on Europe.
Federalist editor Ben Domenech has broken ground with a piece called: “Are Republicans for Freedom or White Identity Politics?” In his either-or question, of course, notice there is no room for nationhood. Nationhood is a concept that Marxism, boring from within our own institions for the past century, has eradicated from the American mainstream, from Left to Right.
The Federalist story subhead reads:
“Donald Trump could transform the Republican Party into a coalition focused on white identity politics.
We’ve seen this in Europe and it’s bad.”
“… and … it’s … bad”?
Wait — is this conservative commentary, Sesame Street, or an old Chinese wall newspaper? And what is it about those glimmers of hope that patriotic parties in Europe offer that Ben Domenech thinks is “bad”?
You’ll have to read the piece for yourself to find out, but it’s no spoiler to note that it includes no discussion of 1) the Islamization of Europe (the words “Islam” and “Muslim” do not appear) or 2) the long war on national culture and sovereignty. These are the twin aggressions waged by the unelected commissars of the Europe Union and their member-state allies against the peoples of Europe, but all we get is Elites vs. Populists/Nativists stuff. It’s not too hard to pinpoint the author’s own comfort zone. The conservatism of populists, Domenech writes, is “frequently xenophobic, anti-capitalist, vaguely militarist, pro-state, and consistently anti-Semitic.” And: “Between Francois Hollande and Le Pen, most decent people go for Hollande,” he writes.
Well, if “most decent people” vote Hollande, ergo — mais oui!
Domenech’s final analysis is worth quoting, if only to salute his college professors:
The European experience suggests that the burgeoning administrative state, whether run by putative leftists or putative rightists, engenders a reaction against itself. That antithesis usually is illiberal and adopts an aesthetic of anger, because it is the sort of citizenry that the administrative state produces, and because it is in the interest of that state to have that sort of enemy. Everyone who believes in the values that the administrative state at least claims to support and defend — societal pluralism, common decency, some sort of liberalism — gravitates toward it on Election Day. This is a story repeated across Europe –
Come again?
and in rare places like Hungary, we see what happens when the populist-right actually wins, and it isn’t pretty.
I am thinking Domenech is probably invoking Hungary’s Jobbik party for dramatic effect — to spark a little more “aesthetic of anger” in case Marine Le Pen’s Front National doesn’t merit sufficiently frightening “nativist” points. Note that Domenech neglects to mention Geert Wilders’ Dutch Party for Freedom, the most famous of these European anti-immigration, anti-EU parties. Maybe Wilders would earn the European Right too many freedom-loving (and pro-Israel) brownie points.
For the record, it’s worth noting that Jobbik is not a part of the anti-immigration, pro-sovereignty European Parliament bloc that includes members from France, Netherlands, Italy, Austria, Poland, Belgium, Britain.
But these are too many details for the modern conservative pundit. They prefer a simpler script.
Take “National Fronts: Trump’s Rise is Mirrored on the European Right” — the latest by Kevin Williamson at National Review.
It opens:
From Malmö comes the news that the Sweden Democrats, scrubbed-up neo-fascists who have forsaken the Roderick Spode uniforms, have become Sweden’s most popular political party, commanding the allegiance of a quarter of Swedish voters. …
Roderick Spode may be P.G. Wodehouse’s version of British fascist leader Oswald Mosley, but there’s nothing droll about journalistic mud-slinging. Sweden Democrats are not “fascist,” “neo” or otherwise. The term is non-applicable and thus meaningless except as a poisonous barb.
Back in 2008, I visited Malmo, the rapidly Islamizing city with a Muslim population estimated at between 25 and 30 percent, to interview members of Sweden Democrats, then a tiny minority party. I learned that Sweden Democrats stand for immigration restriction in a country that is now the number one per capita European importer of “asylum-seekers,” mainly from the Islamic world, mainly from Somalia and Syria. Perhaps not coincidentally, Sweden now also finds itself to be the rape capital of the Western world, surpassed only by Lesotho, South Africa.
Sweden Democrats stand against the multiculturalism that imposes such immigration policies and lays waste to indigenous culture.
Such positions place the party at odds with the ruling center-Left establishment — and, apparently, with National Review. While parties of the European “Right” (already something of a misnomer given varying degrees of support for the welfare state, for example) differ from country to country, it seems fair to note that they all share, and perhaps with Trump supporters, a core desire to see their countries survive as nation-states with tradition, religion, language, culture and law intact — not transformed or lost in these giant waves of immigration that are bringing traditions, religions, languages, cultures and laws that displace, replace, overwhelm, denigrate or destroy what is native. From Left to Right, media call that core desire “nativism” and worse, but I don’t see it as any different from love of country.
Across Europe, elites much like their American anti-Trump cousins have banded together against these people’s parties. To stick with the Swedish example, we have seen baldly anti-democratic efforts — you might even call them “neo-fascist” — that culminated in parliamentary maneuvers last December to prevent an election that seemed likely to bring Sweden Democrats more political power.
Such context, however, is missing when it comes to the anti-Trump script: Europe is going “right,” and Trump is going “Europe.”
It gets worse.
Williamson writes:
The Sweden Democrats often are described as a neo-Nazi phenomenon, or at least a party with neo-Nazi roots. That is not quite correct.
As always, the casual smear (“not quite correct”) is the worst kind. Meanwhile, who is that so often describes them that way? The Left, of course.
He continues:
As with most European nationalist movements, you don’t have to turn over too many Sweden Democrat stones until what’s underneath shouts “Sieg, heil!” —
“Most European nationalist movements” underneath shout `Sieg, heil’? Could we have a roll call to document that, please? To be accurate (I know, it’s National Review), it is the Left in Europe — Eurabia — where we find shelter for the virulent anti-Semitism of our day, not the Right. It is also worth noting that this summer, when the Swedish government under socialist Prime Minister Stefan Lofven announced unilateral plans to recognize a Palestinian state, it was Kent Ekeroth, a leading member of Sweden Democrats (and half-Jewish himself) who organized opposition in the Swedish parliament.
Defaming Sweden Democrats as “scrubbed up neo-fascists” and vilifying Europe’s right as Sieg-heiling-nationalists (and connecting all to Trump and his American supporters) isn’t just a disgrace; it’s a cliche. And it’s not just a cliche, it’s a cliche of the Left. As with the “nativist” smears, conservative outlets are following the Left’s playbook. The Right is using the same buzz-words and smears that the Left concocted not to further debate or refine our thinking, but rather to stop debate and freeze our thinking. It is in the same disastrous tradition of “Red-baiter” and “Islamophobe.” This is dirty-bomb terminology — “nativist,” “neo-fascist,” etc. — and is supposed to render the contaminated ones radioactive, then contained and finally disposed of.
Of course, with Trump, it’s not working.
Comments are closed.
