These People are Nazis
JD Vance and His Friends
Every time I think my insistence on the fascism thesis might have gone too far, something comes along to bring me back to my senses. So, sorry to sound like a broken record, but come the fuck on already. In her New York Times column yesterday, Michelle Goldberg highlighted JD Vance’s blurb of Jack Posobiec’s book Unhumans. You may remember Posobiec as one of the people that pushed the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory. What’s his argument? That leftists are not human beings. They are unhumans. Another way to put that is subhumans. Untermenschen. Goldberg:
The word “fascist” gets thrown around a lot in politics, but it’s hard to find a more apt one for “Unhumans,” which came out last month. The book argues that leftists don’t deserve the status of human beings — that they are, as the title says, unhumans — and that they are waging a shadow war against all that is good and decent, which will end in apocalyptic slaughter if they are not stopped. “As they are opposed to humanity itself, they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman,” write Posobiec and Lisec.
As they tell it, modern progressivism is just the latest incarnation of an ancient evil dating back to the late Roman Republic and continuing through the French Revolution and Communism to today. Often, they write, “great men of means” are required to crush this scourge. The contempt for democracy in “Unhumans” is not subtle. “Our study of history has brought us to this conclusion: Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans,” write Posobiec and Lisec.
Posobiec goes on to praise Joe McCarthy and Francisco Franco as admirable political models.
Responding to my piece on JD Vance from last month, the National Review’s Rich Lowry thought it was preposterous to suspect anything “quasi-fascist” about Vance’s nationalist diatribe at the R.N.C.:
E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post found Vance’s riff “troubling.” Chris Lehmann of The Nation thought Vance’s speech took a “blood-and-soil turn.” Substacker John Ganz headlined his post on the speech, “This Land is Mein Land.”
These critiques are thoughtless, ahistorical and utterly removed from the lived reality of Americans. Our common associations — a common language, history, culture and land — matter a great deal, and acknowledging as much isn’t quasi-fascism.
Uh huh. Rich, the reason why one might suspect something a little fascist going on with Vance is that he’s associating with fascists and echoing their ideas. He’s made himself part of the effort to create a reactionary avant garde in this country, what I’ve elsewhere called the “authoritarian right family,” borrowing from the sociologist Michael Mann. A February interview with Tyler Cowen interview on the subject of “political theology”—Carl Schmitt’s term, by the way—with Vance’s patron Peter Thiel has recently come under scrutiny for these remarks of Thiel:
I don’t think we’re ever in a cyclical world, but there are certainly certain parallels in the US in the 2020s to Germany in the 1920s, where liberalism is exhausted. One suspects the democracy, whatever that means, is exhausted and that we have to ask some questions very far outside the Overton window.
Liberalism and democracy are exhausted so we need to “think outside the box” for another kind of regime. Vance has echoed similar sentiment: “We are in a late republican period…If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.” They are talking about dictatorship as a necessary step because of the current hopeless state of decadence. I don’t think we’re in Weimar, but they do: This is exactly how the Weimar “conservative revolutionaries spoke” and, yes, their Nazi cousins, too.
If there is one sacrosanct principle in the American society, it's that the so called elites — or rich people — absolutely under no circumstances can be declared "deplorables" in the polite society, which extends to their ideologies. When tomorrow JD Vance or Elon Musk publicly declare themselves fascists, then "How dare you to use the F word" commentariat of today will seamlessly switch to opinions "It is time to revisit fascism. Have we been brainwashed by Allies' propaganda?"
Yes, ideologically accurate, but I believe what we have is best seen as good old fashioned 19th century reactionary European ideology transplanted to the early 21st century in a colonial settler mode, rather than as early 20th century fascism.
Classical fascism also carried over that same 19th century ideology, and certainly featured settler colonialism, but its historical and geopolitical proximity to the 19th century meant that fascism was a much more organic extension of that century. In addition, there was the specific shock of the military defeat of the old Central European landlord aristocracies who commanded those defeated armies, then also confronted with the specter of "Bolshevism" on their eastern flank. This included Italy, who suffered humiliating military defeats in that war and who got nothing from the peace. See "The Persistence of the Old Regime", Arno Mayer, for the state of the old European ruling class before WW1.
None of those specific conditions obtain in either Europe or North America, the latter with no legacy of a post-feudal landlord aristocracy. Instead the dead "tradition" is that of European settler colonialism and the enslavement of non-Europeans. That featured the white European settler patriarch fathering 12 kids with his household female chattel enslaved to this task - Elon Musk has literally 12 kids via 3 women, and his space fantasies are also an expression of settler colonialism.
This pro-natalism is the core of today's transplanted reactionary ideology. It demands the collective re-enslavement of primarily white women into a collective matrix dedicated to pumping out more white babies. It's that disgustingly brutal.
For Europe is in sharp demographic decline (but so is East Asia, so go figure), while North America is relatively underpopulated by current world standards. North American capitalism could use more cheap labor, and the rational way to supply it is through immigration. But that will not come from Europe, and therefore immigration will not bring "its best people", accelerating the gradual shift of the social basis from white to non-white, eroding also the traditional social base of the Republican Party, sending this to its historical doom. That's what the hysteria is all about.
So it is no accident that the leading ideologues are wealthy white South Africans. Worse yet, the most rapidly growing demographic is in West Africa! Specters of a Black Planet! Revenge of the enslaved!