The Coming Purge

We're going to need a left-wing Joe McCarthy

Two stories, both in Politico: One is the not-at-all surprising revelation of racist group chats filled with Young Republicans; the other— “Capitol Police called to investigate swastika in GOP congressional office.” As it so happens, some of the “Young Republicans” aren’t so young: some are in their 30s, and one is a state senator. Both of these stories reflect the phenomenon I’ve labeled “groyperfication,” the steady infiltration over the past few years of neo-Nazi and fascist propaganda, memes, and personnel into the mainstream of the Republican party, conservative movement, and, now, the United States government. You can also see it in the content posted by major government Twitter accounts, such as those of the DHS and the White House. Nick Fuentes now brazenly claims, “There’s groypers in every department.” He’s probably right.

Unfortunately, such news stories no longer have the same effect they once had. Today, the Vice President of the United States runs interference for them. The idea that the right would be able to police its own boundaries was always partly mythical—Buckley, for instance, indulged the fringe much more than he purged—but today it’s an absurd proposition. This is just who they are, and they know it. Use every staffer after his desert, and who should ‘scape whipping? As a political necessity, they realize they must protect their own and will ferociously counter-attack any attempt to thin their ranks.

I’ve joked that my constant warnings about far-right infiltration into government make me sound like a left-wing Joe McCarthy, but what these creeps have managed to do over the past decade is almost exactly what McCarthy believed was happening to the United States, except it’s Browns instead of Reds. The historian Leo Ribuffo, in his book The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War, describes a “Brown Scare” during the Roosevelt years that he argues was directed against an exaggerated threat of fascist subversion and set the stage for the Red Scare’s violations of civil liberties. (Maybe wily old FDR was just farsighted, wise, and expeditious in his use of power—traits our present political elite lacks.) Something like that idea certainly influenced some of the left-wing critics of the “fascism thesis” who feared a backlash. But it’s clear as day that today there is a problem on a massive scale. And if the Democrats manage to take back power, they will have to do a bit of purging.

Now, I’m sure some readers will object that the McCarthyism of the left already happened: what was “woke” and “cancel culture?” Well, I don’t often criticize those things because their critics are a dime a dozen, but the way I see it was that there were two deviations from the correct line. On the one hand, the discourse of white supremacy did not differentiate properly between the center and the far right, and viewed racism as so endemic to the American experience that virtually everyone was culpable if they were not actively “anti-racist” in just the right way, that is to say, echoed the correct shibboleths. One might argue that recent events vindicate this account of total depravity, but in practical politics, it had the deleterious effect of not properly isolating the real threat. The other deviation was left-wing anti-anti-fascism, which spent an enormous amount of time and energy denying something that was right in front of our faces. Just hear how godawful Daniel Bessner’s analysis now sounds in the age of Fuentes, Kanyes, and Candace Owens:

No self-identified fascist is taken seriously in American society. There are no genuinely fascist op-ed columnists, no fascist TV commentators, no fascist celebrities, no fascist elected officials. You’re unlikely to find people reading actual fascists outside of European history courses.

The problem now is that the metastasis might be nearly complete. (And there are still people who think a fascist plot is far-fetched paranoia.) One of my first big pieces back in 2020 was trying to root out extreme right infiltrators into the mainstream. My sources for the piece were nice, helpful young center-right boys who didn’t like Trump and said they wanted a better right. Today, to a man, I’d reckon, they are now either ensconced in the regime or open racists. They were swallowed up and conformed. Even then, I could see the professional commitment to bad faith that would allow them to deny what was really happening. No doubt, they all blame the looniness of the left for their Gleichschaltung. Those positioning themselves now as the reasonable center-right with some real institutional power—I think we all know who I am talking about—have totally failed to see the degree of the problem, made it worse by inviting charlatans and loonies into the mainstream, and have instead spent all their time beating down the left.

I’m not sure targeting individuals or sources of propaganda works either. You can’t pull it from the roots because it has no roots. It really is more like an infection and infestation. I think Hannah Arendt was correct when she said evil spreads through sheer thoughtlessness. Writing to Gershom Scholem after the Eichmann trial in 1964, she remarked:

It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never ‘radical’, that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface.

The Republican Party is rotted through. We will see now about the rest of America.