These two developments together bode badly for what’s to come. They suggest that U.S. reactionary right-wing movements may be characterized by a very particular form of rising nativist and ethnonationalist cruelty at exactly the time when increasingly pressing global challenges will require a diametrically different approach.
The future of authoritarian populism
A new book helps us make sense of this. Called “The End of the End of History,” it projects the future of global politics at a moment when Western liberal democracy’s future no longer seems assured, as the allusion to Francis Fukuyama’s famous (and misrepresented) thesis suggests.
This sort of increasingly virulent reactionary politics forms one of the “ideologies of the future,” imagined by co-authors Alex Hochuli, George Hoare and Philip Cunliffe. They posit a future authoritarian populism fusing a longing for “strongman” leaders with a “Malthusian narrative.”
This narrative sees pressing global challenges as an opening to build up a zero-sum ideology that emphasizes “limited resources” and a “need to reduce surplus populations” by “removing outsiders and other elements” that corrupt the “indigenous” population, as the Real Answer to those challenges.
What’s relevant for us here is the book’s argument that covid has provided this form of politics with a new reason for being, a moment it will seize by telling a “nationalist” story of the global pandemic:
A nationalist interpretation would see a forceful rejection of globalization and cosmopolitanism: the organic body of the indigenous nation is threatened by deleterious outside influences, and limits on resources necessitate their exclusion.
I think something like this may be developing in the U.S. right now. There’s a peculiarly ominous signal in the way GOP governors such as Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida are fusing their rejection of collective public health solutions with demagoguery about migrants.
Covid and migrants: A joint infestation
It’s the fomenting of hysterical opposition to local officials enabling communities to collectively protect themselves, combined with the aggressive redirecting of blame toward migrants instead, that makes this mix so combustible. Why take sensible collective action for the public good when calling for higher walls to keep out the joint infestation carries so much more force?
Something similar is happening with Afghanistan refugees. Here our direct responsibility for their plight, and our reliance on them during the war, is absolutely undeniable. Indeed, as the Times reports, this is why some Republicans support resettling them here.
But this has only been met with an even more vehement denial of the very idea that this places a peculiar obligation on us. Indeed, as former Trump official Olivia Troye has revealed, Stephen Miller, the chief architect of Trump’s ethnonationalist agenda, expressly worked to undermine our programs for resettling Afghan refugees even as we were relying on them in real time.
Miller is now ubiquitous in shouting down the idea that we owe them anything, positioning them as the invaders, as the threat to us. And Miller is an active spokesman for the future direction of this sort of ethnonationalist politics.
‘Avocado politics’
This, too, bodes very badly, particularly when you factor in climate change and the looming climate refugee problem. Climate is another area where our outsize contribution is undeniable. But this future reactionary right may well see this as an occasion to double down on that exclusionary “Malthusian” narrative.
Nils Gilman has coined the term “avocado politics” to describe this: green on the outside and brown (as in brown-shirted) on the inside. As Gilman suggests, this reactionary right-wing response will acknowledge the “climate emergency,” but primarily as a way to justify even higher “border walls to hold back the flood of those fleeing the consequences.”
It’s not a fun exercise to imagine what this might mean — in the right-wing imagination, anyway — for future militarization of our already hyper-militarized border. Unfortunately, this ugly convergence of covid and refugee politics should prompt us to start preparing for that future right now.
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August 26, 2021 at 10:18PM
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Opinion | The dark future of far-right Trumpist politics is coming into view - The Washington Post
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