The Washington PostDemocracy Dies in Darkness

Opinion The dark future of far-right Trumpist politics is coming into view

Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity. (AP)

The anti-immigrant politics of a certain swath of Republican politicians and Donald Trump loyalists have taken a particularly virulent and ugly turn of late — and if you look closely, you can catch a glimpse of the future direction that U.S. far-right Trumpist political aspirations might take.

This unsettling hint of what’s to come emerges, surprisingly, from the confluence of two big developments in our politics that aren’t linked in any obvious sense: the surge in covid-19 cases, and the battle over the coming resettlement of Afghan refugees in the United States.

Right now, the Republican Party is deeply split over the refugees created by the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, as a new report from the New York Times details. While some Republicans recognize an obligation to admit them here, as many worked alongside the United States, many are aligning with Trump and demagoguing them in the most despicable terms imaginable.

Meanwhile, with covid cases on the rise, GOP governors in states seeing the worst outbreaks are escalating efforts to blame this on migrants who, fleeing their own horrors, are attempting to cross our southern border. The right-wing media disinformation apparatus has pushed this message with lockstep unity and unfathomably disgusting vitriol.

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These two developments together bode ill 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

Abbott and DeSantis, each in their own way, declare that covid-bearing migrants are crossing our border en masse. This has been widely debunked, but the story is what matters: covid and migrants as joint infestation. Meanwhile, they have converted their public positions into platforms to speak to the Trump Rump, the shriveled national minority who sees mask mandates as collectivism run amok.

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?

This conflation is everywhere. Right-wing media propagandists are relentlessly combining fearmongering about vaccines with scapegoating of migrants, positioning nativist, ethnonationalist cruelty as a kind of higher answer than science and collective action. Watch this extraordinary montage, and you cannot miss the centrality of that synergy:

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 ill, 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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