The Nationalist-Socialist Moment Is Here
30th July 2016
Kevin Williamson has a very bad feeling about this.
In the event, the two presidential candidates Americans got most excited about were Donald Trump, a nationalist, and Bernie Sanders, a socialist. Between the two of them, they make a pretty good national socialist. Trump won his party’s nomination and Sanders ceded his to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is (arguably) a little bit more of a nationalist and (arguably) a little bit less of a socialist, but in many ways a much better distillation of the partnership between big government and big business that characterizes our current political moment.
In Germany in the 1930s, the people the National Socialists were most worried about were the real sociaists, the SDP.
The people who don’t like free markets and free people, who want to control who you can buy from and sell to, or regulate who can criticize a politician and when and how, don’t think that way simply because libertarians have never figured out how to translate the gospel into their language. They have other values and other agendas. The white nationalists in the Trump camp and the Black Lives Matters activists opposed to them do not secretly want to be libertarian individualists on the Randian model: They want their identities affirmed by state action. They want a politics of Us and Them. Populist movements cannot survive long without a Them.
And the people who run the country today are very much about suppressing Them.