The tragic poison of extremism

 

I've been worried for years about how the extremes of American politics, both left- and right-wing, have been growing stronger, and eroding the center.  Mutual tolerance, openness to new ideas, and acceptance that others can be right and we can be wrong, have always been the hallmark of civilized discussion.  Trouble is, as our civilization crumbles under so many pressures, so too do those hallmarks.

Rod Dreher, a commenter whose insights I value greatly, has written two columns about anti-Semitism and its disastrous effect on right-wing politics.  They epitomize the dangers I'm seeing in the body politic as a whole right now, because the same comments can be applied to other extreme viewpoints as well.  They're long articles, but worth investing the time to read them in full.

In his first essay, Dreher examines the rise of the "groyper" influence.

Every one of the right-wing Jews to whom I spoke last night believe that Tucker Carlson is the most dangerous man in America to Jews, because in their view, he’s the most important mainstreamer of anti-Semitism on the Right. This was painful for me to hear, because I consider Tucker a friend, and though I have been disturbed by the anti-Jewish turn his rhetoric has taken, I had not been aware of how extensive his anti-Jewish commentary had been (I don’t regularly listen to his podcast), nor the effect his rhetoric has had on the outlook of American Jews.

. . .

As we left the Green Room headed to the stage, we saw on our phones that Tucker had hosted [Nick] Fuentes on his show. For me, this was a bright red line that I was hoping Tucker would not cross. But cross it he did ... Tucker asked nothing about Fuentes’s past statements praising Hitler, or any number of horrific things that have come out of that kid’s mouth, (e.g., “We will make Jews die in the holy war.). And then there’s ... blaming “organized Jewry” for threatening the existence of America, because they allegedly put the tribe over the common good.

. . .

The fact that Tucker Carlson, the most influential right-wing media figure in America, went from dismissing Fuentes early this year as a gay twerp in a Chicago basement, to having him on his show and blessing him with a soft interview, is a sign of the times. And not a good one. It was a two-man Unite The Right rally. Bad times ahead. The time to find your courage, fellow conservatives and Christians, and speak out against this stuff, is NOW.

Fuentes comes off on the Tucker broadcast as reasonable, despite his anti-Semitism, sexism, and deranged bigotries. If you are tempted to think of Fuentes that way, I advise you to look at this long compilation of the sick pedophilic stuff Fuentes and his followers have posted online. (There is no pedophilia imagery, don’t worry; it’s just screengrabs of texts and videos in which they celebrate pederasty and rape.)

. . .

As I’ve long said: Jews are canaries in the civilizational coal mine. As the gatekeepers and authorities are collapsing everywhere, we are going to see horrible things. I am thinking this morning about my warning from twenty years ago to the Left that if they accepted anti-white identity politics, they were going to legitimize pro-white, anti-everybody else identity politics among a younger generation that lacks the taboos. And it has happened. It is a howling absurdity that Fuentes, Candace, et al. claim to be Christians while promoting this stuff, but you should know that outside the US, the connection between Jew-hating and Christianity is historically well-established.

So, by the same logic, if the Right legitimizes Fuentes-style identitarianism, it is going to push normie liberals (what few there are left) further into radicalism. This is the Weimar dynamic: the feeble and discredited center could not hold against the growing strength of left-wing and right-wing radicals.

. . .

Many of us on the Right have wondered for years why decent liberals in authority kept their mouths shut about the left-wing anti-white bigots. And then the crazies took over the party. It’s happening to the Right now. I don’t know where this is going, but it’s nowhere good — and it’s getting there with accelerating speed.

A frightening thought: what if there are no gatekeepers at all anymore? What if anybody can say anything, and do not risk political exile or irrelevance?

There's more at the link.  Disturbing, but highly recommended reading.

In his second essay, Dreher looks at the similarities between the Weimar Republic in post-World-War-I Germany, and current political events in the USA, and puts the "groyper" phenomenon in that perspective.

I was talking today with a Christian I know who is a big player in conservative politics, and who is as appalled by it as I am. He tells me that what normie outsiders like me don’t know is that something like 30 to 40 percent of the Republican staff in Washington under the age of 30 are Groypers — that is, followers of Nick Fuentes.

Let that sink in.

. . .

The essential appeal of Trump, I learned, is not so much from his policy proposals (there weren’t many), but because he was a big fat finger in the face of a corrupt Republican establishment.

I didn’t vote [in 2016], because I couldn’t stomach Trump, I would never have voted for Hillary, and my vote didn’t matter in Louisiana anyway, as it was destined to go to Trump in the electoral college. But watching how the Left went into manic overdrive to destroy him and everything related to him changed me. The Kavanaugh hearings in 2018 broke me. I realized that as bad as Trump was on so much, he was the only thing standing between Us and Them. I voted for him in 2020, and though I wasn’t in the US in 2024, I openly supported him then. The Biden administration showed us what wokeness in power would and could do. I had no qualms at all about supporting Trump 2024, even though his personal character flaws are all too clear, still.

Now it seems that Fuentes is having the same kind of appeal to Zoomers as Trump did for Boomers and others a decade ago. Compared to Fuentes, though, Trump comes off as Marcus Aurelius. The Fuentes you see on the Tucker interview is not at all the Fuentes of his livestreams.

I simply cannot understand the logic behind treating Fuentes as a normal political actor — even if he has a relatively big following. He is a deeply bad man, with no redeeming qualities. If his mode of discourse, and beliefs, become part of the mainstream of conservatism, we’re done, and we will deserve it. To normalize Fuentes is to move the Overton Window where it must not go. It’s like saying, “Well, I personally disapprove of sniffing glue, and I think it’s bad for us, but if we are going to stop people from glue-sniffing, we need to listen to them to see why they take pleasure in sniffing glue.”

Look at what happened to the Left once they started giving respect and attention to the radical Left. We got the Great Awokening, in which it was considered perfectly legitimate to attack white people as evil because of the color of their skin, and to cancel people for simply dissenting from whatever new radical thing they demanded we all accept as truth. Now they’re about to elect an actual old-Zoomer Islamic race communist as mayor of the most important city in America. Zohran Mamdani is a million times more charismatic than Nick Fuentes, but I see them as part of the same trajectory of American politics.

. . .

I’ve used the term “Weimar America” from time to time, but now, it be gettin’ real.

What we mean when we talk about “Weimar Germany” is that time in Germany between the end of the First World War and Hitler’s accession to power in 1933, when Germany’s democracy wobbled under the pressure of economic collapse, and the falling-apart of all institutions, including parties of the center. Moral norms evaporated, especially around sexuality. Real power in the streets shifted to extremes of Left and Right.

. . .

This past spring, at a screening of the LNBL documentary in Nashville, a woman in the audience asked if I thought the danger of “soft totalitarianism” had passed because Trump was in office again, and the woke were on the defense.

No, I said, because all the conditions that [Hannah] Arendt identified as present in a society ready for totalitarianism are still with us. I don’t want to live in a right-wing society like that any more than I want to live in a left-wing one.

. . .

I have zero sympathy for people on the Left in all this. They chose not only to platform, but to bring into policymaking people every bit as radical as Nick Fuentes, only more educated, and better able to negotiate institutional culture. For at least twenty years, I have been publicly saying to liberals that if you embrace and advocate for identity politics of the Left, you are going to call up the very same thing from the Right one of these days.

. . .

Let me say to you, whether you are on the Left or the Right (and I do have some left-wing readers): if you don’t have a Bright Red Line for the kind of radicalism you are willing to tolerate in public, you had better lay one down, because you are going to be tested.

. . .

Weimar America. If, God forbid, there is a high-profile political assassination, or a severe economic downturn, we are going to be in very, very bad trouble. You all know I’m a blackpill kind of guy, but it seems that reality is catching up to my doomerism.

Again, more at the link.

I can't argue with Mr. Dreher's opinion of Mr. Fuentes.  If you're in any doubt about that, go read the thread that outlines Mr. Fuentes' personal morality (linked above).  If that doesn't persuade you, you may be beyond help.

I've been more and more worried by the number of bloggers and "opinionators" (for want of a better word) who are growing more and more anti-Semitic in their diatribes.  To blame any one group for the troubles of our society, of our body politic, is ludicrous.  After all, if any one group was so consistently focused on achieving world domination, surely it would have succeeded long ago?  I reject any attempt to assign responsibility and/or blame to a group.  It's always the individual who's at fault.  Sure, a group of equally guilty individuals may gather together to achieve their joint aims, but inevitably, the group falls apart sooner or later.  (Read any reputable history book for evidence of that.)

Applying that to our country today, I don't blame Democrats, or Republicans, or liberals, or conservatives, or Jews, or snake-handling Bible-belt evangelicals, for the state we're in.  Those groups are part of the problem, but they're made up of individuals who've been more or less persuaded that their particular group has the answers, and everybody else is part of the problem.  I've been personally on the scene of at least a dozen civil wars and inter-tribal conflicts, and in every case the individuals involved were not the problem.  The problem was always charismatic leaders who used emotion, religion (or tribal superstition) and outright violence to achieve their ends.  When the dying was over, it was never a question of "He did it!" or "She did it!" - it was always "They did it!", with "They" being whichever group could be most conveniently blamed.  That simply meant that another generation would be raised to hate that group or groups, and the conflict would start all over again in future.

Right now, we have groups who are more than willing to kill Leftists, and others who are more than willing to kill Rightists.  They don't care whether the people they kill are good or bad - simply by attaching a label to them, they are defined as "on our side" or "enemies".  With such attitudes becoming more and more prevalent, these United States cannot stand united for much longer.  To put it in a Biblical perspective, "a house divided against itself cannot stand".  We've already seen far too many examples of that in this country:  try "Bleeding Kansas" for a start.  There are many others.

Please, friends, stop and think about this.  It's all around us - and it may yet destroy us.

Peter