Can real conservatism exist without authoritarianism?

By SanchoPanzaXXI - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3415994.  Francoist Span's coat of arms.   The motto means "One, great, and free".

Look at Wyoming GOP right now, and you would have to assume that the answer to this question must be "no".¹

And frankly, buying off on election theft myths and mutually reinforcing propaganda aside, there's some reason to think that.  That's basically what Patrick Deneen of Harvard has warned of.  He's the author of Why Liberalism Failed, a major work criticized heavily by the mainstream press, as we've previously noted, and adopted by current conservatives.  Yale's snippet on the book states, as we also previously noted:

Has liberalism failed because it has succeeded?

"Why Liberalism Failed offers cogent insights into the loss of meaning and community that many in the West feel, issues that liberal democracies ignore at their own peril."—President Barack Obama

"Deneen's book is valuable because it focuses on today's central issue. The important debates now are not about policy. They are about the basic values and structures of our social order."—David Brooks, New York Times

Of the three dominant ideologies of the twentieth century—fascism, communism, and liberalism—only the last remains. This has created a peculiar situation in which liberalism’s proponents tend to forget that it is an ideology and not the natural end-state of human political evolution. As Patrick Deneen argues in this provocative book, liberalism is built on a foundation of contradictions: it trumpets equal rights while fostering incomparable material inequality; its legitimacy rests on consent, yet it discourages civic commitments in favor of privatism; and in its pursuit of individual autonomy, it has given rise to the most far-reaching, comprehensive state system in human history. Here, Deneen offers an astringent warning that the centripetal forces now at work on our political culture are not superficial flaws but inherent features of a system whose success is generating its own failure.

Now, Deneen did not state that we needed to elect an orange haired Duce  whom we "must work towards" in order to impose the proper order upon society.²  At least, I don't think he did, having not read his book.  And the essence of what Deneen apparently states here, as summarized by the Yale review, is correct.  Political liberalism "trumpets equal rights while fostering incomparable material inequality"  It also "discourages civic commitments in favor of privatism; and in its pursuit of individual autonomy, it has given rise to the most far-reaching, comprehensive state system in human history."

All that is true.

Perhaps more disturbing is that liberalism/progressivism has unmoored itself from any sort of external greater force.  Depending upon how you view it, it either takes the position, basically, that man can vote on his own private wishes, and God must endorse them, or that individual desires are paramount and nature must bend to and accommodate them.  There's no possibility of unity in any of that, and it's deeply anti-nature. There's not even the possibility of a society functioning that way, on a long term basis.

So, given that, is it the case that conservatism must assert itself, by force?

That seems to be the conclusion that Orbán and a host of Eastern European leaders have concluded.  They're willing to tolerate democracy, but only if certain things are universally agreed on first.  And that sort of top-down directive nature of government, as long as it seems conservative, is the reason so many Americans of the MAGA persuasion, like Tucker Carlson, have been Putin cheerleaders.  It's also the reason that CPAC has swooned over Orban and has come very close to adopting his Illiberal Democracy point of view.  And it's the sort of point of view, sort of, that lead the Edmund Burke Foundation to adopt a "National Conservatism" manifesto this past June.

But it's also deeply illogical.

The basic core of real conservatism, indeed any political philosophy, is that it's right.  And conservatives believe they're right on two things, social issues and economic ones. . . well conservatives who have completely bought the package believe that, there are plenty of people who believe in one of the two tenants of conservatism and not the other.

But ironically, in believe that they are right, real conservatives, have always believed that man is flawed, and it's best to rely on tradition and what we know of science to guide us.  Old time conservatives, quite frankly, in the Buckleyite era, tended to be elitist, and proudly so. They were well-educated, at least at the upper levels, and didn't take their beliefs from the masses.  Indeed, often they assumed they were a permanent minority that could influence heavily, but was unlikely to rule.

We should note here that populist, at least right now, are fellow travelers of conservatives, but their views aren't really the same at all.  Populist tend to believe that the mass of people have some native instinct that's right because they have it.  It's thin on education and tends not to trust elites of any kid, because they ain't elite.

Basically, five guys in a corner drinking Budweiser, and lots of it, are presumed to know more about just about anything, to current populists, than five theologians or conservative philosophers.

And of course, in various circumstances, populists can be extreme rightist or leftists.  Early Soviet Reds were basically a  type of populist.

Note the irony of the illiberal democracy point of view.  Conservatives believe they're right, but they also believe, if they are illiberal democrats, that the attractions of progressivism are so strong that they'll overwhelm those truths unless they're enforced by force.

The current right, basically, believes that if offered dessert over dinner, kids will east dessert first every time.  Put another way, the current American right believes that given a choice, everyone is going to opt to be transgendered and there's no argument against it.  None at all. So people have to be forced to comport with what 99% of humanity already does naturally.

Progressives have believed something similar for decades, which is why they sought to enforce their beliefs through the courts. The basic concept was to enforce their beliefs through liberal courts and either plan on that enforcement indefinitely, or hope that people would get used to the enforced change over time and accept it.  Conservatives took the opposite view, at least up until recently.

This is what the recent battle of being "woke" is about.  Truth be known, hardly anyone anywhere, as a large demographic, has been in favor of things that may be defined as "woke".  But the courts enforced wokism, or at least opened the doors and windows for it. So, for example, you have Obergefel redefining what love means and the ancient concept of marriage, and soon thereafter "accepting" transgenderism is a major societal push.

Illiberal democrats argue that we should simply close the door on these arguments via fiat.

The problem with that is twofold.  No bad idea ever goes away in darkness. That's why the goofball economic theory of Communism rose up in autocratic states.  Bad ideas, like viruses, die in the sun.

Secondly, it presumes that your own arguments, while right, just can't compete.  Arguments that can't compete, however, can't compete ever.

Now, the way that Illiberal Democrats would probably put it is that the truth has been established but corruption, unleashed by evil, is always there to take things down.  In some ways, this view is an elitist one, even though populist that have adopted that are anti elites and don't know that (which is part of the reason that currently conservatism and populism may ride on the same bus, but they aren't the same thing).  Basically, this view at some level, openly or simply instinctively, takes the position that regular people are like children.³

Enforcing conservative via fiat has never worked.

Ask Marshal Petain.

The French political right has never recovered from Vichy, and it basically lost its ability to really influence anything.  

The Trumpist wing of the GOP is taking the Republican Party in that exact same directly.  If it keeps going this way, you can guaranty that Gender Queer is coming to a school library near you, pretty freaking soon.

There's a much better way to go about this.

And what that is, is this.

Conservatives should make their argument, and in making it, take a page from their Buckleyite past.  When accused of being elitist, embrace it.  Football players in the NFL are elites.  The Green Berets are elites.  Accused of being an "elite", lucky you.  Say you are, and as an elite, you know better.

Adopt Western Society, but its great thinkers and lights.  Donald Trump isn't one of them.

Don't try to be populists, populists can come to you.

Don't eschew science. Science is science and it aims at the truth.  If you reject it, your chances are better than not that you are favoring myth over reality, and dangerously so.

Realize that cultural conservatism doesn't equate with capitalism.  Capitalist are after the money.  You are after the culture.  Confusing the two sews the seeds of destruction.  Things that are deeply conservative, in real terms, are often anti-capitalist.

Embrace democracy.  You aren't always going to win, but you can always argue your point.  Arguing your point is trying to convince.  Forcing your point via fiat is a concession that you can't win through persuasion, as your argument is weak.

For a few minutes there, before Trump' narcissism spawned his coup, and the Supreme Court returned to the rule of law, you really had something.

You're blowing it.

Footnotes

1.  Based upon the most recent proclamations of the Central Committee, you also have to be deeply anti-scientific and an adherent to wacky conspiracy theories.  If you ever wondered how a rational German could have believed that the Jews were responsible for all of Germany's ills of the 20s and 30s, well just look at how the Central Committee thinks that Bill Gates and George Soros are messing with the state's energy sector.

2.  "Working toward the Führer" was a primary ethos of Nazi Germany.  Hitler didn't come up with all the bizarre beliefs and policies of the Third Reich on his own, his acolytes developed many just trying to figure out what Hitler would do if he was working on the topic. The Trumpist wing of the GOP has pretty much picked up on that sort of thing and worked towards Trump, who in turn has worked back towards them.

3.  The irony of this is that quite a few members of these movements have already eaten the desert.  If their underlying foundation is really meant, and they have, for example, adopted any aspect of the Sexual Revolution, which frankly most Americans have, they're hypocritical.

Related Threads.

Illiberal Democracy. A Manifesto?

How did things get so messed up?

By Di (they-them) - This SVG flag includes elements that have been taken or adapted from this flag:, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=114863039

American democracy is in real trouble right now, there's no doubt.  The evidence is everywhere.

From 2016 to 2020 the President was a boorish multimillionaire whose early history was that of a New York Democrat.  Picking up on the anger in the country, he converted himself into a populist Republican and ran the nation in a semi unhinged manner restrained only by as set of advisors that reigned him in, or simply just didn't do what he wanted right up until when he tried to retain control through a coup.  On the plus side, however, Mitch McConnell basically ran the judicial nomination system, and after decades of Democratic picks who regarded the Constitution as more of a loose set of guidelines than a law, and weak kneed Republican nominees who turned out to be disappointments, some real jurists were finally elected.  

Now we've reached the point where in Arizona there's a serious chance the next Governor will be an election denier, in Pennsylvania a quack doctor may be their next Senator, and in Wyoming we're going to elect a Congressional candidate who stabbed her predecessor in the back and claims to believe, although I very much doubt she does, that the election was stolen.  Indeed, if she doesn't believe it was stolen, that makes her all the worse for promoting lies.  In the Secretary of State's office the current interim occupant is another election denier, and in January Chuck Gray, who based his campaign on nothing else, is going to be elected to an office he shouldn't be holding.  The state's GOP, meanwhile, is led by an extreme right wing Trumpite.

Democracy, truly, is in peril.

How did this happen?

We've dealt with this before, but if we really look deeply at this election, what we're seeing is 1) a hardcore group of Americans who feel their culture is being attacked, and not without merit for that belief, and 2) a group of fellow travelers who would probably, quite frankly, join in any political movement as they either don't think their claimed beliefs through or they want to be on what seems to be the winning side.

Note that I didn't say that it was because people believe the election was stolen. Some do, but what is really the case for most of those people is that they want to believe the election was stolen.  

And they want to believe that, as they want to believe their nation was stolen.

Was it?

The culture wars have been going on in the US for a lot longer than pundits would have it.  Indeed, the United States has always had some sort of culture war going on, and It's always had more than one culture.  But by and large, its culture as a whole has been a Western European Christian one.

And by and large, it still is.

Attacks on that go back quite some time as well.  Indeed, one way it is sometimes dated is to go October 31, 1517, when Monk Martin Luther ostensibly nailed his 95 Theses to the Wittenberg Cathedral door.  In doing that Luther, who temperamentally should really never have been a cleric, unintentionally ushered in the age of individualism, which is always an attack on a culture as it ultimately must mean that an individual can define a culture himself, and sooner or later that leads to a sort of rampaging societal narcissism.

Which we have now.

Which means the 1517 date isn't a bad one from which to track the decay of Western European society, of which we are part.

Whether that's correct or not, we see larger, more radical attacks coming about in the late 18th Century. The celebrated French Revolution, a massive failure, was one such example.  The following of Communism and Communist Revolutions, which were ideologically and historically children of the French Revolution, are more recent examples which did real damage.

But through it all, the basic tenants of society remained.  Two genders.  Conventional relationships.  Marriage. A broad Christian concept of society, held even by non Christians. All of this was part of Western European, and more particularly, American, life.

That's been under attack since at least the 1920s, and very much under attack since the 1950s.

And that's what people are reacting to, albeit, much too late, and often on an instinctive level that ignores their own hypocrisy.

We just ran an item entitled Cis. That doesn't explain it all, but in the conversion of the GOP into a sort of Populist-Fascist Party, we see part of the reaction to that.  When people say the 2020 election was stolen, what they really mean, on an instinctive level, is that they want their culture back as the cultural norm, and any result contrary to that is a species of theft, as it's illegitimate.

Put another way, they don't accept that homosexuality is normal. They aren't accepting the damage done to marriage. They don't want a multicultural society of any kind.  

They also want Detroit of the 1950s back, and American industry back. They want Dayton Ohio back before it was modern Dayton. They want blue collar jobs that you work at all day long without a lot of thought, and when you knock off at 5, you go to the bar with your buddies, hit on the bar maid, and then go home to your wife.

They want to set the dial back.

But they don't want to set it all the way back, and that's what's so ironic.  Only parts. They probably just want to set it back to maybe 1985.  Not 1885, or 1485.

And they don't want to impose the societal rules that apply to themselves personally.  That is, other people should not be openly acting on self identified sexual concepts, but the disgruntled voters, assuming their inclinations are conventional, doesn't really want to return to a day when Playboy was still capable of being banned in some places, divorce required fault, and living in sin was heavily frowned upon.  Going back, in other words, is fine for me, where I like it, but shouldn't have to bind me otherwise.

And, in setting things back, you have to really honestly ask what you are setting them back to.

This isn't going on just in the United States.  It's going on elsewhere in the Western World.  Hungary and Poland provide two such examples, and they're not alone.  Just the other day, Sweden elevated to power a party that has its roots as a recent Neo Nazi movement.

So do they really believe the election was stolen?

I don't think they care.  And if they do mean that, they probably really mean that the election was stolen when Teddy Kennedy's immigration reforms became law in the early 1970s, and when the results of the Stonehill Riot didn't come out as expected.

Getting here was a long road.  Part of it was an American inability to really restrain the negative implications of technology that started to come in during the early 20th Century.  Film, in particular, brought a leveling impact on society nationwide, but it also brought in a depressing one.  Prior to the initial introduction of movies, a person might be able to indulge in their prurient interests, but it wasn't a very safe thing to do, and it'd become widely known, or risk becoming widely known, and condemned.  After movies came in, it was at first easy to indulge in that just by going to them. There were no laws that precluded anything from being shown on film, and some early silent movies were outright pornographic.  That brought in the Hayes Production Code, but the influence of money meant that was only able to hold back the tide.

Even while the production code was in effect, the improvements in film of all kinds, and in medial production, meant that leaps and bounds were taken in regard to the portrayal of women in society, and not in a good way, by the 40s and 50s.  Playboy broke the door down, and the Sexual Revolution of the 60s and 70s did what all wars do, destroy.

The Great Depression of the 30s played its role by bringing in the Federal Government in ways it had never operated before, and by effectively destroying the American System of economics, which had always blending government assistance with private, and often localized, economics.  Even by the mid 30s some were complaining about the impact of The New Deal on localized economies and cultures, such as "The Southern Agrarians" in I'll Take My Stand.  It was a losing battle, however, due to the great crisis, which was followed by a second great crisis; World War Two, and a third great crisis; The Cold War.  A nation that had to engage in that sort of struggle, or rather ongoing struggles, for a period of sixty years was one that was going to be geared towards economic magnitude and emphasize it above all else.  

It had to.

This was also the glory years, truly, for American industry and therefore for American blue collar workers.  European industry had been destroyed by the Second World War.  The British and French Empires collapsed.  The Soviet Union was our only contender in the world, but it wasn't that much of an economic contender.

So no harm in relaxing the standards a bit, eh?

Legal standards certainly relaxed.  A Supreme Court which had taken the Lochner view prior to Franklin Roosevelt's threat to pack it relented and then, during the long Democratic period in power, followed by Republicans who were economic conservatives but were in the middle of the road, became effectively a third branch of government in the way it never had been before.  And again, at first this was necessary, as the Supreme Court smashed through the vestiges of legal color barriers and forced the country to live up to its founding documents of the Revolutionary and Civil War period for the first time since the 1870s.

All that was necessary, but like most things, if the first helping is good, a second or third is warranted.  The large size of the government did not abate at any point. The Court, having addressed concerns that it really needed to, went on to things which it neither had a need to nor really had any legal ability to address.  The ever expansion outward of the economy was never reigned in, and Americans were converted from people into consumers.  And, finally, a Democratic Party that had struggled between liberalism and reaction, freed itself of its reactionary wing but launched into first its New Deal wing, and then following Watergate, it's very liberal wing.  While the latter occurred, the Republican Party largely stood by the wayside until the mid 1970s, when the reaction started.

The party reaction started then, but there had been reactions all along, and they spread and changed during the 1960s.  It was also during the 1960s that the Baby Boomer generation, all over the Western World, enjoying economic largess on an unprecedented scale, began to adopt in a large way the more radicalized, in every sense, features of the 1950s.  This eroded social institutions from below while the Courts eroded them, in the US, from above.  Governments in the West attempted to address this, but largely post 1968 by accommodations.  Social institutions of all types began to try to react during the 1960s as well, with many that had traditionally been very conservative in their outlook moving towards the left.

The reaction didn't begin to develop until the mid 1970s, but by that point so much had changed that finding a point on the compass was difficult.  In the United States, Reagan came in and moved the needle back towards the right.  In the United Kingdom, Margaret Thatcher did the same.  But even as that occurred, most of the progress, if viewed that way, was fairly limited in real terms to economic matters on a large scale, with very little on the small scale.  Social conservatism rose in the late 70s and early 80s, but not enough to really disrupt the overall direction of things, and the Court moved only from left to left center.

Given this, real systemic and social problems that set in soon after the end of the Vietnam War never ended up being addressed.  Industry began to flood overseas without any effort to arrest it.  Social changes brought about by the courts continued on.  Social change at the local level was adopted wholesale by certain "elites" and the entertainment industry, to some degree in ways that would be regarded as shocking today.  Damage to social structure was ongoing.  Immigration reform brought in by Ted Kennedy and his fellow Democrats that reflected a concept of global social justice and 1950s style unabated economic opportunity set in so much that it's never been capable of being addressed.

While this occurred, the hard hat class lost their jobs.  Men who had provided incomes for their families no longer could.  Man and women had to go to work to support their families. The concept of simply abandoning women and children to the support of the government fixed in.  Institutions long held sacrosanct were attacked.

So, in essence, Baby Boomers who grew up in their parent's 1950s and early 1960s (with the early 1960s really being part, culturally, of the 1950s) and then attacked it, looked back to that past and hoped to live in it, finding they could not.  But not just that, the "Greatest Generation" that fought World War Two, looked back at the glory of the 40s and 50s, and the social support of the 1930s, and couldn't figure out how this had happened.

The World War Two Generation, once condemned by the Boomers and now universally praised by them, has largely passed away. But the Boomers, elderly though they now are, has not, and many of them are irate.  And their children, who grew up in the broken world the Boomers created struggle as well, kept down in various real ways by the Boomers, but also looking for a raft in the flood.

And then entered Donald Trump.

Like Adolph Hitler of the late 1920s and early 1930s, Trump has a message to deliver to his followers and it is that you can go back, and that this is not your fault.  Hitler told the Germans that losing World War One was not their fault, even though it certainly was, and that they'd been betrayed by the Jews.  He would take them back, and not back to Imperial Germany, but to a Germany far beyond that which existed only in myth, when the Germans were rising out of the forest to conquer the world by right.

Trump promises to take Americans back, to Make America Great Again, and to take it back as well. Back to an era when we were the only power on the globe, the only one making things, and when all was right in the neighborhood.  And, implicitly, just as Hitler promised to restore German greatness to the exclusion of all others whom the Volk had to deal with, Trump implicitly does the same.  Trump's America is a white, male, Protestant one.

This narrow view of the United States doesn't reflect a country that actually ever existed, but it does completely buy off on two foundational myths of the country, one being the country was founded in much the same way betrayed in The Patriot, and the other being the less Puritan one of the 1950s.  As odd as it may seem, Trumpist Americans see the country as a combination of strongly endowed with Puritan heritage while enjoying the pinups on the wall at a working class bar.

You cannot, of course, have both, which is the further irony.  Every Trumpite who wants to "make America great again" and sees the country, as many strongly do, as a result of Manifest Destiny, would need to first consider that those early forebearors would be horrified by much personal conduct exhibited by average Americans today. Trump himself is basically a serial polygamist, something that up until recently was regarded as beyond the Pale for public figures outside of the entertainment industry.  Divorced and remarried Americans who are populist standard-bearers are bearing a standard which, at its core, would not sanction that.  We could go on.

Much of this is, we'd note, a failure of Conservatism. This all should have been something that Conservatives addressed, but they failed to effectively do so.  Perhaps at least through Reagan they simply lacked the power to do so.  They do lack the power to do so now, which explains the abandonment of democracy by a surprising number. But make no mistake, Conservatism and populist, let alone espousing Illiberal Democracy or fascism, are not at all the same thing.  Conservatives are failing right now, as they have not taken on the illiberalism of the Trump forces that have stolen their banner.

We should hope they recover the courage to do so.  Otherwise, large sections of the American public are falling into delusion, and the fate of the country rides on them being awakened from it.

Conservatives have good and valid points about the antidemocratic nature of the left that got us here.  Only recently, it seems, have American progressives woken up to the need to support democracy. Before that, rule by a legal aristocracy was fine with them.  But resorting to exclusion and denial of the vote, and the will of the voters, will not be the long term answer to anything. Rather, it sews the seeds of ultimate destruction, first to the true Conservative cause, and secondly to democracy itself.

The Agony of being a Catholic Voter in 2022

Catholics, according to the Church, are obligated to vote, and to do so in an informed manner.

And, I'll add to that, those who like to say that religion should stay out of politics are grossly misinformed, at least to the extent they mean that religion should be held personally and not influence a person's vote.  A truly held set of religious beliefs ought to inform everything a person does.

This year is simply agonizing for the well-informed, thoughtful, Catholic voter.

In my area, where I will vote, two women contest for the position of Congressman.

The Republican expresses pro-life views, and views which suggest that she holds traditional views on the definition of marriage, two positions which are taken very seriously, even definitively so, by serious Catholics.

She also holds a mix of conservative views on various other issues, some of which I agree with, and some of which I do not, but none of which are moral issues, or at least not closely so.

The Democrat holds pro abortion and "progressive"  views on the definition of marriage, and a host of other liberal views, some of which I agree with, and some of which I do not, but none of which are moral issues, or at least not closely so.

So, no dilemma, in weighing the voting scale, eh?

Well, the Republican has also expressed the view that the election was stolen, and her entire campaign was basically a stab in the back on the incumbent who stood by principals.  In order to advance her campaign, she went from doubts, to being certain of election theft, and is now expressing views regarding the current administration which might charitably be described as nutty, even going so far as to suggest that inflation is a Democratic plot designed to bring about a liberal "Utopia".  If I'm to take her asserted positions as actually held, it would mean she's believing in wild flights of dangerous fantasy, thereby making her a scary potential office holder.  If I am to assume that they're taken for the purpose of being elected, she's lying and an enemy of democracy.

And there are no viable third party choices, really.  One is from the far right, and the other from the Libertarian Party.

The far right candidate, running on the Constitutional Party ticket, is probably every bit as far right as the Republican, but with a very obvious Protestant Evangelical bent to her campaign.  She doesn't say the vile things that the Republican does, and to the extent that her positions sound nutty, they sound nutty in the way that a position expressed by a person with little experience in the world and little education might voice them.  Innocently, in other words.

Maybe I haven't listened enough to her, however.  Frankly, I've disregarded her all along as a candidate that will obviously make no impact in the current election. (I subsequently listed to the debate she was in, and it's relatively clear that she's in the "coup didn't happen camp", although as noted, she probably genuinely feels that way, as opposed to Hageman, whom may not).

The Libertarian is a Libertarian, and there's no point in even going there.

A person could protest vote for the Constitutional Party candidate, but that's all it would be, a protest.  But then, in order to make that protest, a person ought to know what she really believes.  Perhaps I should go back and listed to her in the recent debate, which the GOP candidate skipped out on.

The only realistic hope of defeating the candidate that's either lying or coming off the rails is to vote for the Democrat, which is voting for a position which is normally gravely morally objectionable.

And then we have the Secretary of State's office, where a co-religious is running unopposed based on a stolen election theory along and is otherwise not a candidate which I'd prefer to consider.  A protest is surely mandated there, but it'll have to be a write-in protest.

And so the state's politics have come to this.  It feels like being a German going to the polls in 1932.

Something in the wind, part 2 of 3. The rise of the radical populist right. A second look at the Italian election. . . and a bunch of other stuff.

Giorgia Meloni not sounding like Donald Trump.  In a sort of "make Italy great again" speech she calls for uniting the country, governing for all Italians, and doesn't sound like some sort of cheap badly done rendition of Goodfellas.  Indeed, her articulate nature comes across, even if you don't grasp Italian, in comparison to Trump's nearly complete lack of it.¹ Her victory message is certainly different, but the proof, of course, is in the cannolis, not in the menu presentation.

Does the election of Giorgia Meloni tell us something about what's going on in the US right now?

I think it does, or at least did, and therefore explains in part how we got to where we now are.

More than that, does it tell us what isn't going on, and what Trump's backer's might get, or rather the country, if we keep going down this road?

It probably does.

First, we'll note, her victory has already been heralded in parts of the English-speaking world as a non-fascist victory for true conservatism.

At the same time, the American usual suspects, probably none of which actually would be comfortable with Meloni's actual world view, rolled into congratulate her:

Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Ted Cruz under fire for celebrating Italian far-right victory

Italian politician Giorgia Meloni’s party traces its roots to the Second World War-era fascist movement founded by Benito Mussolini

All of this tells us a few things.

The first is that the FdI's rebranding of itself as a non-neo fascist party is taking root successfully, but it remains challenged.  The party certainly had its roots there, and its symbol is made up of flames from Mussolini's grave, after all. But maybe it has reengineered itself as a right wing populist party that's no longer an anti-democratic fascist one.

Secondly, the English-speaking right is switching its attention from Viktor Mihály Orbán to Meloni, and maybe that's a good thing, if the FdI is no longer fascist and is democratic.

Of course, at the same time, the populist American right remains basically captive to a large degree to Donald Trump and his acolytes.

Finally, it really shows us what the populist Trumpite wing of the GOP, which anymore we might as well just call the GOP, is, and isn't.

So, what is Meloni's platform?

Well, I'm not Italian and I hadn't heard of the FdI until just the other day, or if I had, I hadn't paid all that much attention to it.  Italy has had more than one neo Fascist party over the years.  But it's easy to find videos of her giving really fiery speeches.  A lot of those have been condensed into snippets, but if the full speech is listed to, they go in directions that you don't really expect.  As far as I can tell, and I may be way off, the FdI, under Meloni, is hugely and unapologetically traditionalist and right wing populist, by it retains some syndicalist economic views.  It also has dabbled, to some surprising extent, in social legislation which would be regarded as left wing in the United States, as trying to pass a bill regarding child care for working mothers.

So what caused more Italians to vote for it than any other party?

Probably that traditionalism, which is grounded in a sort of philosophy of nature, or new essentialism, or even a combination of classical Western thought and evolutionary biology.  It appears, at least in its Italian form, to be of deeper thought than that of the normal American version.  Indeed, American conservative intellectualism is of a much different type, and really hasn't evolved in any concrete form since Buckley's day.

What it might simply boil down to is what we've already mentioned.  The FdI and Meloni are enormously anti-Woke and aren't apologetic about it in the least.  They are also very nationalist in the "Italy for Italians" sense of things. And all that instinctively appeals, all around the globe, to people who aren't keen on being as multicultural as progressives assure them they should be and who, deep down, don't believe that a species that is male and female and has had marriage as its central fundamental societal element needs to now change that view.

It's a huge reaction to 1968 and the things 1968 foisted upon Western Society.

It's also, we might note, a reaction to the 1970s and the Greed is Good ethos that a triumphant capitalism brought in everywhere in the 1980s and 1990s.  That part of Meloni's public platform seems missed.  Meloni, however, has attacked modern globalism, and therefore that part of capitalism, pretty openly as well.

These themes all appeared in the far right before.  Mussolini's original fascism was actually extremely radical in a left wing sense, reflecting a radicalism he'd grown up with, and his original membership in the Socialist Party.  The Italian Fascist, however, combined some really left wing concepts with some extreme right wing ones, which was common to early fascist movements in many, but not all, places that it took root, that being one of the things that has made fascism so difficult to define.  Because it did that, however, it also appealed to societal voters in the countries where it took root, who would adopt some of its views while blinding their eyes to others, and indeed blinding their eyes to the most radical elements of it.

Indeed, that's what made and still makes fascism really dangerous.  We can see it in this example, maybe, and we can now see it in the U.S.

Indeed, we'll turn to the U.S. here, with this entry by some conservative journalist:

He’s Still the One
Sohrab Ahmari & Matthew Schmitz

Republican voters face a clear choice in the 2024 presidential cycle. Those who think the conservative movement has the solutions to the nation’s crises should vote for a conventional GOP candidate. But those who believe the conservative movement is part of the problem should support Donald Trump.

Only Trump defied the deep state empowered by his Republican predecessors. Only Trump has broken from the disastrous foreign policy championed by the conservative movement. Only Trump has taken on the mania for free trade and outsourcing. No other figure of the right has shown the same willingness to break with his own side’s orthodoxies.

We've noted it here before, but we'll start with this and add in the Meloni element.

What's causing this hard right turn?

Well, in the U.S. and in Italy it's a feeling by rank and file, working people, that their politicians have completely abandoned them and their concerns combined with a reaction to modifying millennia old, and DNA rooted, institutions.  That's pretty much it.  The FdI promises to do something about that. American Conservatives have promised to do something about that since at least 1976, if not earlier, failed to do so, and even basically lied, in some instances, about their devotion to really doing so.  They've started to do something, and ironically it's really Mitch McConnell, through his Supreme Court appointments, whose really started to change the social aspect of this around, in part.

The part where this isn't true had to do with unchecked illegal immigration.  Trump, once again, did do something about that.  Progressives and many others hated what he did, but he did do something, and that made him the first President since Teddy Kennedy's immigration reforms altered what had been in place to do so.

Economically, Trump had a good three-year run until COVID-19 came by plane, most likely, and ran through the country killing people and destroying the economy.  Trump never acted like an economic conservative, however, and the GOP was pretty comfortable spending money like sailors on a three-day shore leave.  As, by and large, people are happy with a good economy, it didn't really matter.  

A person is free to view this anyway they wish, but Trump's far right policies, which appealed to many rank and file Republicans of the far right, and appealed to rust belt Democrats who came into the GOP, were nativist, traditional WASPish, and very socially conservative.  To a very large degree, if they had been advanced by a more conventional politician, that individual would have been regarded as a huge success.

They were not advanced, however, by a conventional politician, but by Trump.  It can be doubted, quite frankly, the extent to which Trump believed in any of the things he advocated for, or believes in anything at all other than himself, whom he appears to believe in obsessively.  Trump is not an admirable man.

Trump may simply have picked up, as a salesman, on what his demographic wanted to buy.  If he had done nothing more than that, he could not be criticized for it.  Indeed, politicians of all stripes do that and in a democratic system, they must.  There's no reason to believe, for example, that Harriet Hageman really thinks the election was stolen.  Her base believes that, and so she must.  It's an irony of the democratic system that really effective advocates of certain positions, truly believed by a politician's base, might find no real sympathy with the politician themselves.  Indeed, that's why we find advocates of traditional family values caught up in sex scandals of all sorts, or advocates of law and order involved in crime. 

Selling to your base, we note, is probably also why we find Kyrsten Sinema a Democrat looking out for monied interests.  For that matter, it also may very well explain why politicians in certain regions seem to take positions that are contrary to their educations and backgrounds.  They likely don't believe what they're saying, they believe they need to say it.

All of that is how democracy actually works, in part, but only in part.

Trump departed with that, however, in a truly fascistic sense.  Appearing to believe principally in himself, he created a personality cult, some of which adopted the worst beliefs and inclinations of his supporters.  And he became his movement, which is what Mussolini became, for example, to Italian fascism.  His supporters still believe in him, but he believes in himself more.  He essentially advances the concept that he, and only he, can save the nation against forces which are illegitimate.

And that is the core of fascism. FWIW, it's the core of Communism, too.

We said there may be lessons here.  If so, what would they be?

The principal ones are the ones that Trump learned before he ever took office, and what Mitch McConnell, for all his differences with Trump, also knows.  1968 is over and much of what it brought has been ruinous.  People look back instinctively to core societal traditional values and do not want change forced on them from above, or at all.

But what is also there is that there's a major society wide rejection of the consumerist economic revolution. People everywhere are wealthier than they used to be, but they are also more tied to their occupations than ever, and they don't want to be.

And people look at their countries and communities differently than capitalist do, and they don't want to look at them differently. They don't really want ever expanding this and that, and they often would just as soon have things be as they once were, rather than where they seem to be going.

All of those things can be advanced democratically.  Meloni claims that she will now do that.

We'll see.

But this raises another question, particularly for American populists.  Are you really wishing to buy the entire package?

Footnotes:

1.  Meloni has a very direct and highly pithy form of delivery.  In contempoary American politics it would be nearly impossible to find an analogy, in part because she very clearly means what she says.  An interesting contrast would be to Trumpite Harriet Hageman, who is articulate enough, but who lacks the element of sincreity that Meloni obivously has.  Perhaps only Liz Cheney, whose delivery is different, is comparable.

Trump's style nearly defies description, but it's odd and sort of oddly childish, as if he's delivering a rambling address to himself, or to a group in a children's club.  That he's gained a wide following is surprsing in part for that fact, as people generally don't like being talked down to.  He doesn't come across as consdesencing, but as not too bright.  Interestingly one realy diehard fan of his that I spoke to some time ago, who couldn't imagine anyone not admiring him, related that "he speaks like us".  Of note, that person was of a highly blue collar background from the East, which gives some creedance to the theory that New York politicians of recent years have learned their speaking style from dealing with East Coast mobsters.

Prior Threads in this Series:

Something in the wind, part 1 of 3. The rise of the radical populist right. A second look at the Italian election. . . and a bunch of other stuff.

Prior Related Threads:

It's not just here. The Italian Election and the further rise of the hard right.

Something in the wind, part 1 of 3. The rise of the radical populist right. A second look at the Italian election. . . and a bunch of other stuff.

 

Meloni says she's not a fascist, and compares her party to the British Tories, the Israeli Likud, and the GOP.   The American GOP aside, which is in turmoil and which we'll discuss a little in round two of this fascinating series, the FdI, whatever it is, definitely isn't the British Conservative Party or the Israeli Likud.

Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion. And the scepticism of our time does not really destroy the beliefs, rather it creates them; gives them their limits and their plain and defiant shape. We who are Liberals once held Liberalism lightly as a truism. Now it has been disputed, and we hold it fiercely as a faith. We who believe in patriotism once thought patriotism to be reasonable, and thought little more about it. Now we know it to be unreasonable, and know it to be right. We who are Christians never knew the great philosophic common sense which inheres in that mystery until the anti-Christian writers pointed it out to us. The great march of mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face. We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage. We shall be of those who have seen and yet have believed.

G.K. Chesterton, in Heretics

This quote, but not in its full length, is getting a lot of traction right now as it shows up, in Italian, being quoted by Giorgina Meloni, in a truncated form, which takes from the following:

Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer.

I was surprised to find Meloni quote Chesterton, as I don't think of Chesterton as being a fan of, or useful to, fascists. But perhaps this puts us on the uncomfortable slope where Falangist slide into a certain type of conservatism and trying to define the difficult differences between the Mediterranean post World War Two far right, and Hungarian one, and the American one.

Italian and Spanish fascists were corporatists or syndicalists, which is a hard concept to explain to Americans.  They didn't eliminate free enterprise but rather controlled it, with a concept that everything was subordinated to the good of the state which was supposed to work for the good of the people.  By the people, it usually meant only the nation in the ethnic sense.  In other words, Italian fascists might make common cause with, let's say, Spanish fascists, but that didn't mean that they thought of themselves as the same by any means. The Italian fascists worried principally about ethnic Italians only, which of course ultimately lead to an attempt to expand the Italian empire at the expense of non Italians.  Spain's Franco era (Franco was not a fascist, or a Carlist) pretty much started off that way right from the onset, i.e,. Spain's empire was for the Spanish, not for Moroccans.

Falangist are a subset of fascist, with some distinct beliefs. Their basic core tenants were set out in the Twenty Six Points they issued, which stated the following:

NATION - UNITY - EMPIRE 

1. We believe in the supreme reality of Spain. The strengthening, elevating, and magnifying of  this reality is the urgent collective goal of all Spaniards. Individual, group, and class interests must inexorably give way in order to achieve this goal. 

2. Spain has a single destiny in the world. Every conspiracy against this common unity is repulsive. Any kind of separatism is a crime which we shall not pardon. The existing Constitution, to the degree that it encourages disintegration, weakens this common destiny of Spain. Therefore we demand its annulment in a thundering voice. 

3. We have the determination to build an Empire. We affirm that Spain's historic fulfilment lies in Empire. We claim for Spain a pre-eminent position in Europe. We can tolerate neither international isolation nor foreign interference. As regards the countries of Hispanic America, we favour unification of their culture, economic interests and power. Spain will continue to act as the spiritual axis of the Hispanic world as a sign of her pre-eminence in worldwide enterprises. 

4. Our armed forces- on land, sea, and in the air- must be kept trained and sufficiently large to assure to Spain at all times its complete independence and a status in the world that befits it. We shall bestow upon our Armed Forces of land, sea, and air all the dignity they merit, and we shall cause their military conception of life to infuse every aspect of Spanish life. 

5. Spain shall once more seek her glory and her wealth on the sea lanes. Spain must aspire to become a great maritime power, for reasons of both defence and commerce. We demand for the fatherland equal status with others in maritime power and aerial routes. 

STATE - INDIVIDUAL - LIBERTY 

6. Our State will be a totalitarian instrument to defend the integrity of the fatherland. All Spaniards will participate in this through their various family, municipal, and syndical roles. There shall be no participation in it by political parties. We shall implacably abolish the system of political parties and all of their consequences- inorganic suffrage, representation of clashing groups, and a Parliament of the type that is all too well known. 

7. Human dignity, integrity, and freedom are eternal, intangible values. But one is not really free unless he is a part of a strong and free nation. No one will be permitted to use his freedom against the nation, which is the bulwark of the fatherland's freedom. Rigorous discipline will prevent any attempt to envenom and disunite the Spanish people or to incite them against the destiny of the fatherland. 

8. The National-Syndicalist State will permit all kinds of private initiative that are compatible with the collective interest, and it will also protect and encourage the profitable ones. 

ECONOMY - LABOUR - CLASS STRUGGLE 

9. Our conception of Spain in the economic realm is that of a gigantic syndicate of producers. We shall organise Spanish society corporatively through a system of vertical syndicates for the various field of production, all working toward national economic unity. 

10. We repudiate the capitalistic system which shows no understanding of the needs of the people, dehumanises private property, and causes workers to be lumped together in a shapeless, miserable mass of people who are filled with desperation. Our spiritual and national conception of life also repudiates Marxism. We shall redirect the impetuousness of those working classes who today are led astray by Marxism, and we shall seek to bring them into direct participation in fulfilling the great task of the national state. 

11. The National-Syndicalist State will not cruelly stand apart from man's economic struggles, nor watch impassively while the strongest class dominates the weakest. Our regime will eliminate the very roots of class struggle, because all who work together in production shall comprise one single organic entity. We reject and we shall prevent at all costs selfish interests from abusing others, and we shall halt anarchy in the field of labour relations. 

12. The first duty of wealth- and our State shall so affirm- is to better the conditions of the people. It is intolerable that enormous masses of people should live wretchedly while a small number enjoy all kinds of luxuries. 

13. The State will recognise private property as a legitimate means for achieving individual, family, and social goals, and will protect it against the abuses of large-scale finance capital, speculators, and money lenders. 

14. We shall support the trend toward nationalisation of banking services and, through a system of Corporations, the great public utilities. 

15. All Spaniards have the right to work. Public agencies must of necessity provide support for those who find themselves in desperate straits. As we proceed toward a totally new structure, we shall maintain and strengthen all the advantages that existing social legislation gives to workers. 

16. Unless they are disabled, all Spaniards have the duty to work. The National-Syndicalist State will not give the slightest consideration to those who fail to perform some useful function and who try to live as drones at the expense of the labour of the majority of people. 

LAND 

17. We must, at all costs, raise the standard of living in the countryside, which is Spain's permanent source of food. To this end, we demand agreement that will bring to culmination without further delay the economic and social reforms of the agricultural sector. 

18. Our program of economic reforms will enrich agricultural production by means of the following: 

By assuring a minimum remuneration to all agricultural producers.

By demanding that there be restored to the countryside, in order to provide it with an adequate endowment, a portion of that which the rural population is paying to the cities for intellectual and commercial services.

By organising a truly national system of agricultural credit which will lend money to farmers at low interest against the guarantee of their property and crops, and redeem them from usury and local tyrants. 

By spreading education with respect to better methods of farming and sheep raising. 

By ordering the rational utilisation of lands in accordance with their suitability and with marketing possibilities. 

By adjusting tariff policy in such a way as to protect agriculture and the livestock industry. 

By accelerating reclamation projects. By rationalising the units of cultivation, so as to eliminate wasted latifundia and uneconomic, miniscule plots. 

19. Our program of social reforms in the field of agriculture will be achieved: 

By redistributing arable land in such a way as to revive family farms and give energetic encouragement to the syndicalisation of farm labourers. 

By redeeming from misery those masses of people who presently are barely eking out a living on sterile land, and by transferring such people to new and arable lands. 

20. We shall undertake a relentless campaign of reforestation and livestock breeding, and we shall punish severely those who resist it. We shall support the compulsory, temporary mobilisation of all Spanish youth for this historic goal of rebuilding the national commonwealth. 

21. The State may expropriate without indemnity lands of those owners who either acquired them or exploited them illegally.

22. It will be the primary goal of the National-Syndicalist State to rebuild the communal patrimonies of the towns. 

NATIONAL EDUCATION - RELIGION 

23. It shall be the essential mission of the State to attain by means of rigorous disciplining of education a strong, united national spirit, and to instil in the souls of future generations a sense of rejoicing and pride in the fatherland. 

All men shall receive pre-military training to prepare them for the honour of being enlisted in the National and Popular Army of Spain. 

24. Cultural life shall be organised so that no talent will be undeveloped because of insufficient economic means. All who merit it shall be assured ready access to a higher education. 

25. Our Movement incorporates the Catholic meaning- of glorious tradition, and especially in Spain- of national reconstruction. The Church and the State will co-ordinate their respective powers so as to permit no interference or activity that may impair the dignity of the State or national integrity. 

NATIONAL REVOLUTION 

26. The Falange Espanola Tradicionalista y de las JONS demands a new order, as set forth in the foregoing principles. In the face of the resistance from the present order, it calls for a revolution to implant this new order. Its method of procedure will be direct, bold, and combative. Life signifies the art and science of warfare (milicia) and must be lived with a spirit that is purified by service and sacrifice. 

As can be seen, in the Spanish example, religion was mentioned, but suppressed as subordinate to the overall goals of the state.

Italian fascism did not even go that far, but regarded, oddly enough, the Church as a sometimes intellectual ally in that Italian fascism, while radical in many ways, argued for a return to cultural traditionalism, even though it did not regard that as supporting a religious state.  Essentially, to a relatively small degree, Italian fascism regarded some of the Church's emphasis as traveling on a somewhat intersecting road.

That's not the point of this article here, however, but it serves to point out that while something is going on in the entire Western World right now, it's not really the same every place it pops up.  Consider again the clip we had of Meloni from the other day.

That's one of the most Un-American speeches you can imagine, although a lot of Americans wouldn't realize it.  Not that Meloni would deliver an American speech, she's Italian, but she's not only complaining of the post 1968 liberal changes to the accepted culture, which she is, she's blaming it principally on consumerism.  

This view isn't completely unheard of in the United States.  People will take shots at consumerism, but it's usually people on the left that do it, and they don't link it to feminism and the LBGQT movement like Meloni is.  Not usually.  About the closest I've ever heard of that is the essay that somebody wrote some time ago, I've forgotten who, that homosexuals were regarded as the prefect citizens by liberal elites, as they consumed, but didn't reproduce, and lacked the messy personal nature that the 98% of those with normal inclination have.  That approaches this statement, but it doesn't go anywhere near as far as Meloni did.

Meloni is definitely tapping into something here, however, in that what she's espousing is the concept that post 68 liberalism is at war with human nature, and she's not wholly incorrect in that either.  That's also what partially, but only partially, given rise to populism in the United States.  The part of her speech here that doesn't deal with economics would find a sympathetic ear in some parts of the far right.

Indeed, it finds a sympathetic, if surprised, ear from some who are in the Chestertonian camp, or more appropriately at his stammtisch.  One twitter commentator, for example, noted upon hearing this that in his view he wasn't saying anything that was fascistic, but rather a string of things in line with Catholic social teaching, with which he approved.  This definitely isn't the case for the American Trumpist wing of the GOP.

Is she therefore not a fascist, but rather somebody who would be more comfortable with Chesteron and Belloc?

Frankly, we really don't know.  She hasn't been in power, yet, and her party hasn't been, either.  What may distinguish it is its willingness to act democratically.  That, in the end, has tended to be the defining matter distinguishing very far right political parties from fascist ones, even if the former does not really meet the overall fascist definition.  The Falangist and Italian fascist were hostile to democracy, there's no two ways about it.  Is the modern FdI?  We don't know yet.

For the same reason, we can't say if the FdI is in favor of Illiberal democracy.  Progressives could look at this and immediately say that of course it is, but it's really not that simple at all The FdI may be very far right, without being favoring Illiberal democracy.  Favoring political progressivism and having a liberal democracy are not the same thing, even though progressives seem to feel it is.

At the end of the day, Meloni may end up being a flash in the pan.  As Italy is a parliamentary democracy, her party, while gathering the most votes, only has about 25% of them. The center left party has nearly as many.  The remaining 25%, more or less, of votes she needs from other Italian right wing parties do not all come, by any means, from ones that have the same outlook.

But this will prove interesting.

All over Europe, this trend has been occurring.  Just last week, the Sweden Democrats, which have neo-Nazi roots, became the second-largest governing partner in the Swedish government.  It's a very hard right nationalistic party.  We've already discussed Viktor Orban's Hungarian government and it's espousing of Illiberal Democracy.  Poland's largest party is the Law and Justice Party, which is a right wing populist party.  Slovakia's largest party is the right wing populist Ordinary People and Independents Party.  And France, of course, has the National Rally Party which threatened to take office during the last French election and which is the second-largest party in the government, only slightly behind that of the largest party.

Then we have the current GOP.

Perhaps the real distinguishing thing about the current Trump wing of the GOP, which is the dominant branch right now, is that these other parties, which are not all the same, are at least pretty open about their views, which they can be as they're in a parliamentary system.  In the case of the Trumpist, the views remain partially camouflaged.  And the other major factor right now is that these European parties save for one, Orban's, all seem to be comfortable with full democracy, although I'd certainly hold the question open for the Sweden Democrats on that query as its history would suggest that it wouldn't be, if it were in power.

So, once again, what's that tell us?

It's hard to say, but as noted earlier on this blog, it seems to be an upset with the results of the post 1968 liberalization of the Western World.  People feel it's taken from them and forced them into things they don't agree with and don't want to be. And to at least some extent, they feel that it's brought about a culture that's at war with natural culture.

In short, people feel what Meloni expressed:

Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer.

All of that were things that conservative parties already held, however. They weren't, however, very successful at doing anything about their views in a massive way. All of these groups promise to.

And maybe they actually would. . . but in the American case, what does that actually mean and do people really know what they're suggesting? We'll look at that next.

It's not just here. The Italian Election and the further rise of the hard right.

Fratelli d'Italia, the "Brothers of Italy", have won the Italian election.

Not outright, but with 26% of the vote.  Enough of a command that, together with another right wing party and a center right party, Giorgia Meloni's neo-fascist party will govern.^1 2  The party, in second position, is the Italian center left Democratic Party, but it can't put together a ruling coalition.

This gives Italy, when in the 1945 to early 1970s period teetered on the edge of falling into Communism, its most right wing government since Mussolini was strung up.

The Fratelli d'Italia is nativist, anti-immigrant, anti-European Union, and traditionalist.  It's leader, Giorgia Meloni has said of herself; "I am Giorgia. I'm a woman, I'm a mother, I'm Italian, I’m Christian".  The slogan is sufficiently popular that it's been set to techno pop with her saying those things, in Italian, and it's pretty effective.  You can also find clips of her saying, but to members of the Spanish Vox party, in Italian;

Yes to the natural family, no to the LGBT lobby, yes to sexual identity, no to gender ideology... no to Islamist violence, yes to secure borders, no to mass migration... no to big international finance... no to the bureaucrats of Brussels!"

So where is she basically coming from: Well, here:

It's impossible at this point not to see that something is going on in the Western World.  It's not just Orban, or Trump.

Its the entire Western World.

Indeed, if anything, Trump's version of this is the most decayed and perverted.  Meloni's may be the most open and honest.

So how did we get here?

This might be the reaction, long delayed, to 1968, and all it brought about.

Indeed, it almost certainly is.  The question is what form that takes, and where that form takes shape.  In Italy, Meloni, running from the hard populist right, will form a coalition government in a parliament in which, perhaps ironically, nobody is claiming a minority government reflects corruption in the vote, whereas in our country, with a Federal democracy that's designed to work slow and defeat "coalitions", or parties, one side is.  Therefore, ironically, Italy, which has a history of fascism but never endured de-fascism, democracy may actually be less imperiled.

At any rate, we noted here earlier that in post Boomer generations, liberalism was waning and conservatism building.  What we missed is that it's waning quicker than we anticipated, and the reaction to 1968 seems to be very widespread, and increasingly strong.

Footnotes

1.  "Meloni" means just what it sounds like.  

Indeed, Meloni in a short video clip, can be seen holding two cantaloupes chest high making a joke about it. Something that's somewhat unique to Italian politics, which remains occasionally ribald.

2.  The FdI denies that it's neo-fascist, and while we've referred to them here that way, this wants again raises the topic of "what is a fascist".  It's not as easy to answer as it might at first seem.

The FdI may have a point here, although I frankly don't know.  At the end of the day, fascism implies an element of totalitarianism.  The Italian fascists of the 1920s through 1940s made no bones about not approving of democracy.  The Spanish fascist were of the same mind set. By and large, neo-fascist have also been anti-democratic.

This contrasts with the Illiberal Democrats, who tolerate a degree of democracy, but within a preset framework.  They're okay with the vote, up to a point, and that point is the point at which a society is supposed to have a cultural set of concepts upon which it operates. That's not up for a vote. That concept has a lot of sympathy, it seems, all over the Western World right now.

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist XXXVIII. The Punditry Repeatedly Blowing It.

Why do pundits, from Robert Reich, to the great cast of NPR's Politics, to the round table folks on the weekend shows keep getting politics, their bread and butter, wrong?

Maybe they don't go out and actually live the lives of real folks.

 A recent week from the formerly august journal, The New Republic:

If Merrick Garland had been confirmed in 2016, we would still have the Roberts Court instead of the Trump-McConnell Court. As backlash to “Dobbs” mounts, McConnell may come to regret that fact.

What an amazing load of complete drivel.  No wonder the left remains threatened by the presence of a bizarrely speaking septuagenarian millionaire serial polygamist.

They're clueless.

Here's how the logic noted above is supposed to work.

Suburban women (which in the minds of progressives defines somebody who is a cross between "soccer mom", Betty Crocker and the proverbial "Karen") suddenly becomes a Democratic voter due to the Dobbs decision because, no matter what else she thinks, the issue of abortion, the way progressives define it, is the most important issue in the world to her.  And because of that, she's now boosting gay education in schools, the rights of the LBGQT, and subscribes to the Bernie Sanders newsletter.

And Kansas is evidence of this.

Not hardly.

In the real world, the suburban female voter is more likely to be a mid 30s professional who is watching her paycheck evaporate due to inflation, who can't hire competent help at work as there isn't any, anymore, whose existing help is "laying flat" and "quiet quitting", and who is wondering how she's going to help put food on the table.

She's a lot more likely to vote her pocketbook than 

Most people aren't single issue voters.  A few people, on the right and the left, are, but those who are single issue voters are much more likely to be on the right. And this is why:

Robert Reich

@RBReich

·

11h

Why are Republicans trying to prevent students from discussing sexuality, gender, and systemic racism in the classroom? Because the biggest threat facing the Republican Party is a multi-racial generation of Young people unafraid to speak truth to power — and make them irrelevant.

No, that's not it either.

It's because, starting in the 1970s, the left forced social change into society through the courts, not the ballot box, and average people got tired of being told that something's that they didn't accept, they had to accept, because nine old dudes in dresses told them they had to, Oracle at Delphi fashion.

How the left views the Supreme Court, how the Supreme Court has sometimes seemingly viewed itself, and how the right views how the left views the Supreme Court.  The Oracle at Delphi.  The Constitution has a penumbra? Well okay then. . . 

So what that means is that when Soccer Mom goes to the ballot, she's not seeing it the way Robert Reich is at all.

And you can be 20 years old Ms. Soccer, whose is looking at a world that's pretty messed up due to the "tear everything down" mentality of the 1970s isn't.  She's probably looking for the guard rails, only to find that they've taken off the parapet.

Well, what about Kansas?

Yeah, what about Kansas? That proves the point.

Kansas was a vote on repealing a constitutional amendment.  It was a straight up or down vote.  A person doesn't have to have that strong of convictions on anything to vote on something like that, which is why really badly conceived of constitutional amendments sail past Wyoming voters and become law, and then are completely forgotten.  I'm not saying that vote was insignificant, but if it was combined with pocket book issues and the like, and for that matter other social issues, there's no telling where it would go.

Indeed, real voters have opinions on gun control, abortion, health care, the environment, Donald Trump, inflation and on and on.  In the mind of the punditry Soccer Mom is charging off to the polls on abortion, but that actual voter stands a pretty good chance of having highly traditional values on marriage, a middle position on gun control, is worried on environmental issues, is really worried on inflation, and has no strong opinion on the Orange Haired Menace. 

This doesn't describe the punditry.  The punditry has strong opinions on everything, and they line up right and left.

Real people don't.

Which gets us to this.

Some people vote single issue tickets on social issues, but they're mostly on the right. And they do go to the polls.

Most people don't vote single issue anything, save for rare occasions, and often on very local issues.

Demographic groups align with their deeply held traditions after they establish themselves in the nation, and those traditions tend to be conservative, not liberal.

Those on the left who support their social issues sooner or later take them to the extreme and alienate everyone, and then they don't go to the polls.

Young people generally don't go to the polls, and they aren't going to in 2022 or 2024.

Abortion isn't going to make much of a difference in the 2022 or 2024 elections, and to the extent it does, it'll help the right, not the left.

To the extent any progressive politician is foolish enough to make gun control an issue, that'll hurt the left.

Nobody is going to the polls one way or another on LBGQT platforms, and that's going to play no role in upcoming elections.

Inflation is a big deal and that will impact voters, but in favor of Republicans.

You can't lie to voters for decades regarding their big worries and then have them support you anymore. They'll support somebody who listens to them, even if it's a dangerous bloviator.

You can't force your issues on people through courts for decades and then come out crying about the demise of democracy.  People aren't going to believe that either.

Not matter what pundits believe, and rational people may wish for, Donald Trump just isn't going away, and it's not suddenly going to be the case that lots of Republicans abandon him.

And you can't really have any idea what real people are thinking if you don't have much of a connection with their lives.

Last Prior Edition:

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist XXXVII. Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra? Quam diu etiam furor iste tuus nos eludet? Quem ad fīnem sese effrenata iactabit audacia?*