The American right in the Trump era has a racism problem. It’s fed by a Republican president who race-baits, a media ecosystem whose guardrails have collapsed, the lure of far-right ideas after various center-right failures and the influence of toxic forms of internet community on impressionable minds.
At the same time, the American right in the Trump era faces a liberalism that’s eager to discover and condemn racism where it does not actually exist. Positions that any de-Trumpified conservatism would necessarily hold are conflated with white nationalism, figures who opposed Donald Trump are hammered as enablers of racism, and progressives indulge a political fantasy in which the racist infiltration of the mainstream right is an opportunity to delegitimize conservatism entirely.
The coexistence of these two realities was usefully illustrated in the last two weeks. If you want evidence that bigotry on the right is a bottom-up problem as well as a feature of the president’s birtherism and Twitter wars, just read last week’s SplinterNews exposé on the email group where a cluster of youthful and not-so-youthful right-wingers gathered to play at white nationalism while holding down normal jobs for conservative publications and institutions. What was reported in the piece I can confirm anecdotally: Every extended conversation I have with 20-something conservatives includes a discussion of how to deal with racist flirtations in their peer group.
But if you want evidence that unjust delegimitization is happening as well, consider that in the very same period that the email exposé appeared, a succession of mainstream media outlets served up bogus accusations of racism against prominent and not-so-prominent conservatives.
First Rachel Maddow’s show ran a segment accusing a judicial nominee for the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Steven Menashi (an old friend, full disclosure), of highbrow white supremacy for a 2010 law review essay arguing that Israel’s status as a Jewish homeland is normal rather than dangerously illiberal, because liberal democracies the world over often have similar ethnic identities and foundations. (The Maddow segment neither mentioned that Menashi is Jewish nor that Israel was his primary subject.)
Then The Washington Post published an op-ed attacking J.D. Vance, the author of “Hillbilly Elegy” (also my friend, full disclosure), as a racist for a speech in which he worried about America’s plunging birthrate. In that case The Post had to run a correction, not least because one of the Vance speeches cited in the essay specifically attacked Republicans for being insufficiently sympathetic to ... African-American single mothers.
Then a couple of days later The Post published a peculiar essay by Eve Fairbanks, a usually judicious liberal writer, accusing a group of mostly anti-Trump conservatives and centrists (including, full disclosure, my colleague Bari Weiss) of somehow adopting the rhetoric of Confederates and slaveholders when they argue that left-wing orthodoxies in the intelligentsia are oppressively stifling debate.
And then, just Tuesday morning, Bloomberg Law published a hit piece on an obscure Labor Department appointee, Leif Olson (fullest disclosure: I had never heard of him before), which alleged that he had posted anti-Semitic conspiracy theories on Facebook. Olson was forced to resign before it became apparent that the post in question was mocking white supremacists and anti-Semites, the reporter having apparently failed to recognize crushingly obvious sarcasm in his haste to criticize.
I’m not interested in using this sequence of smears to invite pity for the plight of conservatives in the age of Trump. Olson deserves an apology and reinstatement because of the brazen absurdity of the Bloomberg Law piece, but generally prominent authors and journalists and judicial nominees have to live with a certain rough-and-tumble, and avoid claiming persecution unless there’s a literal fatwa on their heads.
But the sequence is useful in a different way: It’s an opportunity to lay down a marker about what white nationalism isn’t, what a healthy conservatism would look like if the racist strain were quarantined, and which conservative ideas that get swept up in condemnations of Trumpism and white identity politics are actually sensible, serious and true.
Start with Menashi’s defense of Israel’s particularist identity. It is not white nationalism to recognize limiting principles on liberal universalism, and a justifiable role for particularity — ethnic, cultural, religious — in many political arrangements. A sprawling multiethnic republic like the present United States is an admirable thing, to be defended against ethnic Balkanization and racist chauvinism alike. But our democratic imperium is not the only legitimate form of political order, and a society does not automatically become illiberal or racist or authoritarian just because it retains an established church or allows a right of return or maintains a preference for a particular language.
Particularism can lead to chauvinism and cruelty, certainly, and there’s room to criticize Israel or any other nation on those grounds. But liberal universalism is no panacea either: It can overreach and impose an oppressive uniformity, or overreach and simply self-destruct. The self-determination of specific tribes and peoples and traditions — be they Polish, Kurdish, Tibetan or Jewish — can be as necessary to human liberty in some cases as a push toward cosmopolitanism is in others. And insofar as universalists of different sorts — liberal Eurocrats, Bush-era neoconservatives — have gone terribly astray recently in ignoring the role of difference in human affairs, a healthy conservatism has to correct for this error even as it resists the pull of bigotry.
Then move to Vance’s plea for pro-natalism and higher American birthrates. It is not white nationalism to believe that countries like the United States would be better off with more babies. That belief can be held for racist reasons by racists, but it can also be held, reasonably and righteously, by people who worry about the economic consequences of demographic decline ... or by people who worry about the social consequences of shrinking family trees and a widespread unfulfilled desire for kids ... or by people who regard a higher birthrate as a cure for ethnic division because it actually makes assimilating immigrants easier ... or by people who just think babies are good and societies that can easily afford to rear more of them should do so.
In reality, far from being creepily obsessed with birthrates, conservatism actually failed America over the last generation by paying insufficient attention to the economics of child rearing and the natural family’s strange decline. And a healthy post-Trump conservatism must be more pro-natalist or it will not be at all.
Then move to Fairbanks’s critique of the supposed “Confederate” style in center-right pleas for intellectual diversity. It is not white nationalism to believe that growing ideological uniformity in the commanding heights of culture makes American politics more polarized. That belief can be expressed in whiny or self-pitying fashion, sure, and it can be expressed in ways that ignore the political power that conservatism obviously wields, sometimes to tremendously ill effect. But fundamentally, it does not rebut the people Fairbanks absurdly analogizes to slaveholders, the people who worry about the ideological monoculture on campuses or the power of groupthink in elite newsrooms, to say, “Donald Trump is president, what are you complaining about?” — not least because Donald Trump is president in part because of a toxic interaction between the left’s cultural power and the right’s bunker mentality!
Of course conservatism’s concern about its own exclusion from cultural influence is self-interested. (How could it not be?) But that exclusion is still real, and no serious post-Trump conservatism could stop challenging and critiquing it — both for the right’s own sake and for the sake of escaping our present political-cultural derangement.
Finally, move to Olson’s sarcastic mockery of white nationalists. Obviously it is not white nationalism to make fun of anti-Semites on Facebook. But crucially, it’s also not white nationalism for conservatives to try to find ways to persuade and reel back people on the right who are tempted by bigoted ideas. Which means there has to be room for some engagement — sincere engagement as well as Olson-style sarcasm — with the young people taking the Very Online, irony-bro slide into truly toxic territory.
This is worth emphasizing because there’s a strain in progressive commentary right now that assumes that to try to understand the appeal of toxic ideas is to justify and elevate them, and that if you can establish a six-degrees link between a normal conservative and a YouTube racist, then the conservative must be just a gateway drug. Which, admittedly, sometimes is the case. But sometimes the normal conservative is offering a ladder back to sanity and decency, and trying to make sure that if and when a quarantine gets re-established, as many people as possible are on the decent side.
In the end the recrudescence of racism on the right is conservatism’s problem to solve, and it has to be solved independently of whatever liberals and leftists happen to be saying. But the task of solving it still gets a little harder with every nonsense charge or bad-faith accusation. And it does liberals and the left no favors, now or for a post-Trump future, to imagine that accusations of white nationalism can somehow quarantine conservative ideas that are both not actually racist and also, in many cases, true.
Ross Douthat | The New York Times (CREDIT: Josh Haner/The New York Times)
Ross Douthat is an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times.
