the nationalist right
a post-national ruling class that regards itself as the civilized minority and defines itself against a backward majority. The backwardness of the demos lies precisely in its susceptibility to “love of one’s own,” as against the humanitarian’s principled preference for what is Other.
Matthew B. Crawford • Love of one's own
Make America Great Again is nostalgia! It’s policy nostalgia for a world that no longer exists - manufacturing jobs, single-income households, pensions, and thriving local economics. The genius/horror of MAGA is it correctly diagnoses that material participation has been destroyed, but the “solution” is impossible because you can’t restore material... See more
kyla scanlon • Buying Futures, Renting the Past: How Speculation and Nostalgia Became the Economy
What the post-liberals get right—and the reason they are winning—is that the end of history has been sallow, ugly and deflating. Theirs is decidedly not an intellectual objection. It is not even an ethical objection, though it is often trussed up in the trappings of moral outrage. At its core, it is an aesthetic aversion. The long and short of it... See more
Just a moment...
Yet it seems to me that the process of globalisation is not simply a crude attempt to acquire riches. It is that, for sure, but there is a belief system that undergirds it. Commerce is the engine, but what is happening to us all now is not simply about profit. The Machine has its own value system, as we have seen. Capitalist globalisation carries
... See morePaul Kingsnorth • Against the Machine
‘Caesarism’: the rise of demagogues promising to bring order to increasingly formless chaos.
Paul Kingsnorth • Against the Machine
And so a void is created, and into the void rush monsters: fake versions of the roots we are looking for. Identity politics, newly rigid racial labels, extreme forms of nationalism, endlessly multiplying genders, and ‘identities’ constructed online with no reference to reality. The mono-ethnic identitarianism of the far right or the ‘diversity’
... See morePaul Kingsnorth • Against the Machine
“reactionary,” which refers precisely to the desire to reimpose a previous disposition of society after its time has passed.
Article
To some extent, this is a dynamic that often characterizes authoritarian regimes: They integrate different factions via escalation – by ramping up the fearmongering against a real or perceived enemy, for instance, and by channeling all internal discontent into aggression towards that enemy.
Escalation, Authoritarian “Normalization,” or a Democratic Turnaround?
Scholars such as Jan-Werner Müller and Pippa Norris emphasize that populists frame politics as a battle between virtuous people and corrupt elites