Trepidation About the New Nationalism

What are you willing to excuse to see the new right in power?

Thomas Hart Benton, bookplate of a blast furnace, circa 1928

There are aspects of this topic about which I am not yet able to speak freely. Many good people consider themselves nationalists, and I’m not interested in disparaging them. But I want them to think very carefully about what they’re willing to overlook.

If you make their argument in the most simple and charitable form, it seems to me the nationalists have already won. A strong undercurrent of the crypto era is the assumption that you can be a man without a country. You can’t, and you shouldn’t try. That is fairly clear today—the best blockchain projects are getting government contracts, and Sam Bankman-Fried is probably going to prison. More will follow him.

Peak wokeness has probably arrived too. Democrats know it’s a losing issue, and even the party’s left flank is running away from it. State bans on youth gender transitions are going into effect. There is an amusing anecdote in a recent issue of the New Yorker, where President Obama is asked to weigh in on the intramural fights within his party. His office declined to comment, but passed along this Jonathan Chait piece.

Much of the Trump agenda is being accomplished by President Biden: he gets credit for ending the war in Afghanistan, he’s doing a good job managing the semiconductors issue, he’s made several important moves toward stronger antitrust enforcement, and he’s even building the wall. Drag queen story hour doesn’t bother me enough to overlook this.

There are all sorts of reasons why nationalism is a heavy lift in America. Our weak party system is unsuited to it, for starters. There’s a lot of merit to Curtis Yarvin’s view that there isn’t enough juice in the 21st century public for high-commitment political ideologies like nationalism or communism to really work. But I think, basically, the desire for nationalism among parts of the right is a case of outsider-ism. They wish to see in the open what is done in secret in serious nations. Loyalty tests for patriotism, investment coerced or persuaded to be directed toward national interests—it’s a mistake to think these things don’t happen here. They do. You just don’t see it when it happens.

A seminal book on the new nationalism is my friend Ryan Girdusky’s They’re Not Listening: How the Elites Created the National Populist Revolution (check out his Substack here). It’s a great book. I recall attending a book release event when it came out. A plurality of the questions from the audience pertained to nationalism elsewhere in the world, instead of the U.S.; prospects for “international nationalism,” and so on. Steve Bannon’s attempt at a “gladiator school” in Italy for nationalists in Europe was another example of the trend. American right-wingers tended to be so entranced by the prospect of networking with their European counterparts that they forgot America has no real nationalist movement to speak of, just influencers.

The love affair between disaffected American right-wingers and Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary is dismaying to me, frankly. I’m sympathetic to much of Fidesz’s agenda. Their family support programs are great. Their desire to have a greater role for Christianity in public life doesn’t bother me. I wish them the best, but am deeply skeptical there’s much the United States can draw from the ways they go about solving their problems. It doesn’t seem helpful to resolve our issues by making reference to a linguistically isolated Central European country of ten million people.

There is a lot of frustration on the right with the American-led world order, a frustration shared with some European nationalists. The term of art among right-wingers these days is “Globalist American Empire (GAE).” I hold the view that the burden of world empire wasn’t ever democratically accepted by the American people, the U.S. never having had a presidential election that served as a referendum on the choice.

But I’m also cautious about the way this line of thinking can tend toward chaos. If you’re going to make these arguments, you need to be very scrupulous not to be used by foreign interests. Without naming names, I’ll say this is something a few of our new nationalists have not done.

The alternative posed by nationalists and national conservatives, of a concert of independent nations, each looking out for their own interests, is an attractive vision in some ways. Russia sees itself as a patron of these aspirations. It is how the Israeli right would like to see the world. It’s not how the United States sees the world.

The spyware scandals that have rocked several governments in the last few years give me even more pause. NSO Group’s Pegasus, whose export to dozens of nations was licensed by the Israeli government, is just the most prominent example. Last week, Greek police raided another Israeli spyware company in Athens. Israel is by no means unique in using this type of technology, but it’s impossible to deny they stand out.

All the right-wing governments American nationalists have come to admire are Pegasus clients: Poland, Hungary, and India, chiefly, but also the Bukele government in El Salvador, a favorite of crypto enthusiasts. In all cases, the governments in question appear to have abused it to target opposition figures and journalists. The full extent of its use in Mexico, NSO’s first client, is not known, but it seems clear at this point that it has complicated the United States’ efforts to fight the cartels.

Here is an uncomfortable question for right-wingers: how much of the new nationalism, gathered around an Israeli academic’s nonprofit and led by a man who lobbied Christians on Israel’s behalf for years, is downstream of the Pegasus phenomenon? There is every reason to think it has been useful in helping these governments consolidate power in the last few years. Don’t interpret this as an attack on Yoram Hazony, who is a thoughtful man. But he’s a patriot of a different country than mine.

The Pegasus revelations have been met with almost complete silence by the American right, which failed to notice it had been blacklisted by the Commerce Department for acting contrary to the interests of the United States. Major Trump-era figures have been involved with the company, from Michael Flynn, who somehow ended up a hero to the QAnon set, to Rod Rosenstein, to Trump Victory Fund finance chair David Tamasi, who is now representing their interests in Washington.

As one of, as I count it, two journalists who covered it in a right-of-center magazine, and with no Republican other than Matt Gaetz willing to even speak about it, this leaves me feeling somewhat exposed. Hats off to Dan Bongino for covering it on Fox. The press in Israel itself has done a much better job. My old colleague Rod Dreher blogged that Pegasus was on the lips of everyone in the streets of Budapest, but he hasn't written a word since, nor a word about where the software came from.

Without absolving the Israeli government of their promiscuous licensing of this software, it is true that the problem of spyware is bigger than them. It’s a pandora’s box that someone was bound to open. It’s only a matter of time until we find out its use is more widespread here than we know. For the time being, until the fate of NSO Group is decided—a matter inextricably linked to the incoming government in Israel—I find it hard to cheer on these European right-wing governments in good conscience. I’m not interested in aligning myself with conservatives who excuse it, or are silent. If these are the means being employed to bring about a revival of Christianity in public life, then the price is too high.

In a world where this technology is widespread, there is no such thing as journalism. There is no such thing as attorney-client privilege. There is no such thing as dissent. It is a world where nobody has the right to browbeat another about their commitment to democracy, or Western Civilization, because the freedoms that underlie them both will be gone.

In the coming few months I’ll be clearing the air about some of the weirdness of the Trump era, as an exercise in informational hygiene. I have made some enemies thanks to my work, and their attacks, for reasons of movement comity and my own employment, I have felt unable to respond to up to this point. But that time has now come.