Dependency and world-systems theorists have long argued that “unequal exchange” is a key driver of global inequality.
Archive for category: #Imperialism #Multipolar
Ukraine’s Tale of Two Colonizations
Ira
Mon, 09/12/2022 – 03:54
On August 29, Tucker Carlson declared that Vladimir Putin was winning the war, and would win. A claim that he’s made since the war began. Twitter reminded him of this after Ukraine’s stunning surge in Kharkiv, taking back the entire territory from the invaders.
Source: Newsweek
News that the Ukrainian military had forced Russian combatants to retreat from major strategic holds near Kharkiv on Saturday led to widespread celebration online. Some, including activists and politicians, also took the opportunity to lambast Fox News host Tucker Carlson over his past support of the Russian invasion effort.
A counteroffensive by Ukraine was reportedly able to push Russian fighters out of the Kharkiv region “with shocking speed,” according to The Washington Post. Many have viewed the major victory as a sign that the tide of the invasion could turn in Ukraine’s favor after months of fighting.
Illia Ponomarenko, a reporter with The Kyiv Independent, took to Twitter on Saturday to share a clip from one of Carlson’s broadcasts last month, in which he claimed that “by any actual reality-based measure, Vladimir Putin is not losing the war in Ukraine. He is winning the war in Ukraine.”
The fall of 2022 is as good a time as any for the Federal Reserve to announce, as it did this week, how it will start assessing the risks climate change poses to the financial system. This comes after a summer in which British lawns combusted in extreme heat and the Yangtze River dried up in China during most severe heat wave ever. The U.S. Southwest is currently being parched by its worst drought in 1,200 years, and a third of Pakistan is underwater. All of that has happened on a planet roughly 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than it was in preindustrial times. As a new paper finds, another 0.4 degrees Celsius of warming could trigger “abrupt, irreversible, and dangerous impacts with serious implications for humanity.”
In a speech at the Brookings Institution on Wednesday, Fed Vice Chair of Supervision Michael Barr detailed the bank’s initial steps to understand climate risk within the purview of its “supervisory responsibilities and our role in promoting a safe and stable financial system.” Specifically, he said the Fed is working with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to “provide guidance to large banks on how we expect them to identify, measure, monitor, and manage the financial risks of climate change.” Next year, the Fed will launch a pilot scenario analysis to examine long-term, climate-related financial risk.
This is good news, albeit a bit late. Actions elsewhere at the Fed, though, could hobble the world’s ability to respond to and mitigate the climate crisis. All signs now seem to point to the Fed raising the federal funds rate by another 0.75 points later this month. “While higher interest rates, slower growth, and softer labor market conditions will bring down inflation,” Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, last month, “they will also bring some pain to households and businesses.” Powell affirmed that statement this week in a conversation with CATO Institute president Paul Goettler, pledging to “keep at it until the job is done,” while hoping that job could be done without the “very high social costs” that accompanied breakneck interest rate hikes in the late 1970s and early ’80s, which triggered two recessions and a global debt crisis. The Fed’s own economist, by contrast, has warned of a “severe recession” if that body stays the course with raising rates.
Fed officials have acknowledged at least some of the domestic dangers of that path. As Powell admitted, the goal is to “get wages down” and depress demand by making people here poorer and less likely to buy stuff; disproportionately, those thrown out of work and made worse off will be people of color. In the controlled burn that is raising interest rates, America’s most vulnerable workers are the kindling.
But people in the U.S. aren’t the only ones who’ll be hurt; the controlled burn is already spreading. Some 90 percent of foreign currency exchanges happen in dollars, and so-called “emerging markets” (low- and middle-income countries) have enormous debt denominated in dollars, which have been abundant amid low interest rates since the Great Recession. Amid multiple crises over the last few years—a pandemic and ensuing vaccine apartheid, the war in Ukraine, and a steady drumbeat of climate disasters—those debts have increased. A stronger, more expensive dollar is making them harder to pay. According to the World Bank, more than half of low-income countries are at risk of debt distress, or already in it.
Among them is Pakistan, where at least 1,400 people have been killed in flooding that has displaced at least 35 million people. In the midst of a physical and political crisis sparked by rising food and fuel prices, Pakistan has also been attempting to secure additional funds from the International Monetary Fund to stay afloat, packages that come with mandates to enact painful “structural reforms” like making obscenely expensive energy even more expensive. While Americans have been pleasantly surprised to find their dollars at parity with the Euro while vacationing along the Amalfi Coast, the rupee and other basket currencies in poorer countries have hit historic lows against the dollar. As flood damage in Pakistan continued to mount—now estimated to be “far greater” than $10 billion—the IMF approved another loan worth $1.1 billion for the country last week.
Debt burdens limit countries’ ability to respond when disaster strikes, let alone make investments to adapt to extreme weather or mitigate their own emissions. Still, some 80 percent of the paltry climate finance on offer from richer countries to do all these things has come in the form of loans, further adding to climate-vulnerable countries’ debt burdens. There’s been scant climate finance on offer at all, though, as historical emitters like the U.S. continue to brush off concrete conversations about financing for “loss and damage” (recovery) during U.N. climate talks. Whether acknowledged or not, the IMF is now a major provider of climate finance by default.
This all sets up a vicious cycle. Economies now paying even more to service their dollar-denominated debts will, understandably, turn to whatever quick forms of revenue are on offer. For many places—including Argentina—that means exploiting oil and gas reserves, especially now as producers can fetch high prices for exports to Europe. But a climate crisis driven by the burning of those same fossil fuels is wreaking havoc in the countries digging them up; the World Bank has found that floods and droughts have cost Argentina between $500 million and $1.4 billion in annual losses, a figure that could increase by 125 percent as temperatures rise. The situation is worse still for poorer countries. El Salvador, Ghana, and Bangladesh all face serious risks of default, following Sri Lanka’s default last spring. Economic crises are also helping to fuel dangerous political crises, including Salvadoran dictator and bitcoin enthusiast Nayib Bukele’s ballooning police state.
Central banks’ tool kit—monetary policy—remains a limited one for dealing with any number of crises, including inflation. Raising interest rates does little to alleviate real-world supply chain bottlenecks like wheat not being able to get out of Ukraine or a lack of heat pump installers. Policymakers in Europe have started to explore a wider range of options for dealing with rising prices and the cost of living crisis, including windfall taxes on energy company profits and price controls. Fed officials taking steps to understand climate risk and help financial institutions do the same is common sense. Those risks don’t stop at our borders, though. Monetary policy that leaves climate-vulnerable countries drowning under unsustainable debt burdens—and encourages them to double down on fossil fuels—is dangerous in its own right. U.S. workers, that is, are hardly the only ones who’ll be pushed into a hawkish Fed’s sacrifice zones.
Dispossessed at home, people who historically never left their Indigenous lands are steadily migrating to the U.S. in outstanding numbers.
At the last moment, the very last moment, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) released a report on the human rights situation in China. The Office was under enormous pressure by human rights groups to release the report before the High Commissioner left office on August 31. The Chinese More
The post The OHCHR Report on China’s Human Rights Situation: The Conundrum of Balancing State Sovereignty with International Obligations appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
Climate change and conflict are challenging the Federal Reserve’s efforts to combat rising prices
In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at Harlem’s Riverside Church to a crowd of thousands that flowed out the door as far as 120th Street. King publicly condemned the Vietnam War because it had “broken and eviscerated” the civil-rights and anti-poverty movements at home. The American government was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”
Read: Martin Luther King Jr. on the Vietnam War
In 2022, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky invoked another MLK speech while asking Congress to help his country repel the Russian invasion. “‘I have a dream.’ These words are known to each of you today. I can say, ‘I have a need: I need to protect our sky.’” Two months later, Democrats voted unanimously in favor of a $40 billion package of arms and other assistance to Kyiv.
These two moments capture an important shift in how the American left thinks about the U.S. military and war more generally. Progressives typically see war as inherently murderous and dehumanizing—sapping progress, curtailing free expression, and channeling resources into the “military-industrial complex.” The left led the opposition to the Vietnam War and the Iraq War and condemned American war crimes from the My Lai massacre to Abu Ghraib. Historically, progressive critics have charged the military with a litany of sins, including discrimination against LGBTQ soldiers and a reliance on recruiting in poor communities.
Meanwhile, for decades, the right embraced America’s warriors. Defense hawks were one of the three legs of the “Reagan stool,” along with social and fiscal conservatives. The military itself leaned right. One study found that from 1976 to 1996, the number of Army officers who identified as Republican increased from one-third to two-thirds. In 2016, according to a poll in the Military Times, active service members favored Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton by a margin of nearly two to one.
In the past few years, however, these views have started to change. From 2021 to 2022, the share of Republicans who had “a great deal” or “quite a lot of confidence” in the military fell from 81 to 71 percent, whereas for Democrats, the number increased from 63 to 67 percent—cutting the gap from 18 points to four. And the military’s views shifted in tandem. In 2020, dozens of former Republican national-security officials endorsed President Joe Biden because Trump had “gravely damaged America’s role as a world leader.” In one poll before the 2020 election, more active service members backed Biden than Trump (41 to 37 percent).
Why has this happened? Two big reasons are Trump and Ukraine.
Trump saw the military as a symbol of power and surrounded himself with a phalanx of generals. But when he realized they were not a Praetorian Guard that would do his bidding, defend him against all enemies foreign and domestic, and keep him in office by force if necessary, he soured on the military. Trump trampled on its most sacred beliefs and rituals, saying that U.S. generals were “dopes” and “babies” who “want to do nothing but fight wars.” Americans killed in battle, he said, were “losers” and “suckers.” Trump suggested that Gold Star families had spread COVID at the White House. He railed against American prisoners of war: “I like people who weren’t captured.” He pardoned three service members accused or convicted of war crimes, even though military leaders said it would erode the military’s code of justice. In his testimony to Congress, Trump’s acting defense secretary, Christopher Miller, said that Trump had told him to ready the National Guard to protect his supporters on January 6, rather than Congress itself. All of this created a fundamental clash with the military’s code of honor and its commitment to the Constitution. Trump wondered why American generals couldn’t be more like Hitler’s generals—by which he meant the loyalist fanatics who battled in the ruins of Berlin, not the Wehrmacht officials who tried to assassinate the Nazi dictator.
Since he left office, Trump has fueled the conservative belief that Biden is indoctrinating the armed forces with liberal ideas. Republican Senator Ted Cruz said the U.S. military is suffering from a “woke cancer” and is in danger of becoming “a bunch of pansies.” The Fox News host Laura Ingraham suggested defunding the military until it abandons its diversity programs: “Go after their budget.”
It’s true that the military has moved left, and not just because of Trump. After George Floyd was murdered in 2020, Kaleth Wright tweeted: “Who am I? I am a Black man who happens to be Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force.” Last year the Pentagon warned, “To keep the nation secure, we must tackle the existential threat of climate change.”
This shouldn’t be so surprising. The military is the epitome of big government, with egalitarian wages, socialized medicine, and the best government-run child-care system in the country. No wonder General Wesley Clark joked that it’s “the purest application of socialism there is.” Now progressives are expressing a new gratitude for an institution that understands the value of diversity, cares about the rule of law, and was willing to stand up to Trump when the future of democracy was most in danger. At a time of rampant conspiracy theories like QAnon, liberals appreciate that the military operates in a world of tangible threats and complex logistics and has a basic respect for reality. George Orwell said people often cling to falsehoods until the lie slams into the truth, “usually on a battlefield.”
Then came Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. No foreign conflict since the Spanish Civil War has so captured the imagination of the left. Nearly a century ago, many progressives saw Spain as a pure fight between democracy and fascism. Ernest Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls and Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica captured the horror at fascist brutality. About 3,000 Americans traveled to Spain to fight in the international brigades. Today, many on the left see Ukraine as another contest between fascism and democracy, and that rare thing: a good war. Thousands of Americans have gone to join the struggle.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is the antithesis of everything the left stands for. Not only did he launch an unprovoked attack on a sovereign democratic nation, but he has also disparaged LGBTQ rights, multiculturalism, and immigration, and claimed that “the liberal idea” has “outlived its purpose.” Zelensky, in contrast, has built bridges with the global left. He addressed the Glastonbury music festival, in the U.K., where the revelers chanted his name to the tune of The White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army.” In Germany, the Green Party led the charge to supply weapons to Kyiv, overturning decades of German wariness about intervening in foreign wars. LGBTQ protesters in Berlin also demanded that Germany step up arms shipments to Ukraine, so that a Pride parade can, one day, be held in the Russian-occupied city of Mariupol. Ukrainian liberals—artists, translators, teachers, filmmakers—have joined the struggle. As one writer put it: “All our hipsters in Ukraine fight.”
To be sure, there’s a leftist fringe in the United States that still considers America the world’s evil empire and remains deeply hostile to its military power. That fringe includes the linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky, who praised Trump as a model statesman for pushing for a negotiated peace in Ukraine. But the bulk of the left has shown remarkable solidarity with the Ukrainian cause. Liberals who once protested the Iraq War now urge Washington to dispatch more rocket launchers to defeat Russian imperialism. Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York, a member of the progressive caucus, tweeted: “We unequivocally stand with the global Ukrainian community in the wake of Putin’s attack.”
The main opposition to helping Ukraine has come from the right. Trump, who has long praised Putin as a “genius,” questioned why Americans were sending so much money to Ukraine. Most congressional Republicans backed the aid package to Kyiv in May, but 11 Republican senators and 57 House Republicans opposed it. Republican Representative Matt Gaetz tweeted that if the GOP takes the House in the upcoming midterms, support for Ukraine will end. The Fox News host Tucker Carlson claimed that Ukraine is an American puppet state, and that his real enemies are not in Moscow but on the American left: “Has Putin ever called me a racist?”
In March, Democrats were 10 points more likely than Republicans to say that Washington “has a responsibility to protect and defend Ukraine from Russia.” By July, this gap had grown to 22 points. Another recent survey found that Democrats were more supportive than Republicans of sending weapons to Ukraine as well as of accepting Ukrainian refugees in the United States. A remarkable 42 percent of Democrats favored deploying American troops to Ukraine, versus 34 percent of Republicans.
Progressives have always viewed foreign conflicts and domestic struggles as connected—with war being either a dangerous contagion or a righteous crusade. A poster from the Spanish Civil War showed the image of a dead child: “If you tolerate this, your children will be next.” A generation later, the pendulum swung, and King saw intervention in Vietnam as a threat to civil rights in America. Today, the pendulum has swung back, and the left sees the march for freedom in America and the battle to defend Ukraine as part of the same global fight for democracy. After all, the aggressor in Ukraine—Putin—also meddled in the 2016 election to help Trump.
Will the alliance between the left and the military last? Progressives may grow nervous about escalation in Ukraine or lose interest in the war. The economy remains the most pressing issue for most Americans. Perhaps, like Orwell in Catalonia, some American volunteers in Ukraine may decide that the struggle is not as pure as they thought. The left’s underlying concerns about the U.S. military have hardly disappeared. Republicans may one day shove Trump offstage and try to get the ’80s band back together—defense hawks, social conservatives, and fiscal conservatives.
But for now, Trump remains the dominant force in the Republican Party. The Ukrainian cause remains resonant. And the left may worry about another authoritarian great power that threatens a smaller democracy: China mobilizing against Taiwan.
An era of liberal hawkishness should not mean an unthinking embrace of the military. America needs a strong progressive voice to check the rampant waste in the military-industrial complex (which ran to hundreds of billions of dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan). The military has very real problems, like the crisis of sexual assault. It doesn’t benefit from the sort of soft-focus “Thank you for your service” reverence that has prevented people from asking tough questions about America’s disastrous wars in the past. On Ukraine, liberals can channel Washington’s policy in a more progressive direction, stressing human rights, pressing for investment in green technology to reduce reliance on Russian energy, and going after Moscow’s dirty money.
In the end, the U.S. military is the world’s anti-fascist insurance policy. The insurance premiums may be outlandish. And most of the time we don’t need the policy. Until one day we do. If you need to ship M777 howitzers to Ukraine, the military-industrial complex has its uses.
In 1967, King was right to see Vietnam as a catastrophe for America, at home and abroad. “If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam.” But today we face a different world, and a stark choice. Zelensky, Ukrainian progressives, and the European Union? Or Putin, Trump, and Tucker Carlson? The left picked the right side.
“Over the coming months, governments across the world are about to get an answer to a burning question: Will protests sparked by socioeconomic pressure transform into broader and more disruptive anti-government action?”
Once a trade conference of sorts for the activist fringe, the hard-right Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) has enjoyed an increasing amount of influence within the American conservative movement in recent years. The ascendancy of Donald Trump’s MAGA movement in 2015-16 irrevocably shifted the center of gravity of today’s GOP toward a more nakedly extremist, conspiratorial, anti-democratic, and revanchist “populism,” thus placing CPAC firmly within the mainstream of the Republican party.
CPAC itself has been undergoing its own ideological and political realignment, increasingly focusing its energies internationally, reconfiguring the formerly once-a-year conference based in Washington, DC, into a traveling road show.
Over this same period, CPAC itself has been undergoing its own ideological and political realignment, increasingly focusing its energies internationally, reconfiguring the formerly once-a-year conference based in Washington, DC, into a traveling road show. The first international CPAC took place in 2017 in Japan, and others have since taken place in Australia, Brazil, Hungary, and South Korea. Future conferences are also scheduled to take place in Mexico and the Philippines. But this isn’t just about changing the venue of the conference; animating all of this is a growing far-right internationalism that can be seen and heard throughout the program and among the attendees.
This internationalist turn has helped deepen alliances between a coalition of hard-right political parties, activists, and national leaders like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, all sharing a certain familial resemblance and a common interest in anti-immigrant, identitarian, and deeply illiberal approaches to governance.
I’ve been able to witness this shift in part, having attended three CPAC events in the United States over the last two years. In 2021, the presence of international speakers on stage was notable, but the feverish conspiracism of the domestically oriented speakers overshadowed the growing internationalist alliance.
Now, in 2022, this hard-right coalition, which some commentators have dubbed the Nationalist International, has only become more conspicuous with the arrival of Orban to the CPAC stage in Dallas, Texas. Orban was perhaps the most warmly received of the speakers in Dallas, aside from fan favorite Donald Trump. “Globalists can go to hell, I have come to Texas,” he bellowed to great applause.
This internationalist turn has helped deepen alliances between a coalition of hard-right political parties, activists, and national leaders like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, all sharing a certain familial resemblance and a common interest in anti-immigrant, identitarian, and deeply illiberal approaches to governance.
Ahead of Orban’s speech on Aug. 4, the first day of CPAC Texas, a young man from Oklahoma approached me in the vendor hall and expressed in no uncertain terms that Orban was the man he had come to see. I asked the young man what he thought about the resignation of Orban’s longtime advisor Zsuzsanna Hegedus after Orban gave a speech Hegedus described as a “purely Nazi diatribe worthy of Joseph Goebbels.” He was aware of the incident, but it didn’t seem to impact his interest.
“In Hungary, we introduced a zero-tolerance policy on racism and antisemitism,” Orban said to the crowd, in clear reference to the fallout with his advisor. “So, accusing us is fake news. And those who make these claims are simply idiots.”
Orban went on to say conservatives “should unite our forces” and received huge applause when the speech took a religious turn. He compared Hungary to David, described so-called “globalists” as “woke Goliath,” and made clear his opposition to LGBTQ civil rights.
“Hungary shall protect the institution of marriage as the union of one man and one woman,” Orban said to great applause at CPAC Texas. “To sum up, the mother is a woman, the father is a man, and leave our kids alone.”
After Orban’s speech, while I was chatting with anti-Orban protesters in the lobby, the same young man walked by again and yelled out to me, “great speech, right?”
Later on, a segment titled “The World is Watching” saw representatives from Japan, Hungary, and Mexico speak back to back. One of the speakers, Mexican actor and activist Eduardo Verástegui, had seemingly been confused on the initial agenda listing with Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of hard-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who spoke at CPAC Hungary in May.
“These new socialist governments are all committed to a cultural Marxist agenda,” Verástegui said, referencing the “Cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory that is itself rooted in Nazi propaganda. “Their goal is to destroy the Judeo-Christian civilization of Latin America,” he continued, quickly and casually erasing the history of “Judeo-Christian civilization’s” genocidal obliteration of Indigenous populations that existed there long before.
As a toxic mix of conspiracism, religious fanaticism, and ultranationalism cries out in the United States, the rhetoric that has become the hallmark of this brand of reactionary politics isn’t staying put on American soil. It sings in chorus with similar voices across the world, inspiring and amplifying the rhetoric of hardline politicians like Orban.
Hiroaki “Jay” Aeba, chairman of the Japanese Conservative Union and former political head of Happy Science—a cult that denies the Nanking Massacre ever occurred—implored the audience to take to the Metaverse to protect their free speech rights. And Miklos Szantho, managing director of the Hungarian government-funded Center for Fundamental Rights, pushed an openly internationalist line after speaking forebodingly about the ostensible threats to Western civilization.
“It is crucial for us to work together internationally to make the Liberals’ nightmare,” Szantho said, “through the international cooperation of conservative national forces.”
Taken together, these speeches illustrate the uncanny synchrony of the language used by members of the Nationalist International, as well as the ability of American conservative politics to set the tone (and provide a template) for far-right movements around the world—and for the international alliances they’re forming. As a toxic mix of conspiracism, religious fanaticism, and ultranationalism cries out in the United States, the rhetoric that has become the hallmark of this brand of reactionary politics isn’t staying put on American soil. It sings in chorus with similar voices across the world, inspiring and amplifying the rhetoric of hardline politicians like Orban.
But the Nationalist International isn’t a club exclusively for the power elite, and it wouldn’t exist without a movement of followers. A group called the European American Community advertised a reception with activists on the second day of CPAC Texas. The group describes its Facebook page as “a safe place for fellow America First Patriots to discuss ethnic nationalism, identitarianism, and the future of our Historic Anglo American Nation and European Race.”
Meanwhile, on the CPAC exhibition floor inside the Hilton Anatole, a nonprofit group called Republicans for National Renewal manned a branded booth and networked with fellow die-hard activists. The group describes its aim as “promoting national-populism within the Republican Party.” In May, they hosted a summit around the CPAC Hungary event titled “The Future of Western Renewal: A Transatlantic Patriot Summit.”
“This gathering, along with the CPAC Hungary event, demonstrates the interconnectedness of American and European far-right thinking, and highlights the xenophobic, nationalistic rhetoric that is being promoted—and applauded—on both sides of the Atlantic,” the Anti-Defamation League reported in June.
As Thorleiffson writes, ultranationalism, and the “ultra-nation” can be understood as nationalism that takes on a quasi-religious, if not outright religious, character. Something right at home at CPAC Texas, where Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick asserted that the constitution was literally written by God before leading the crowd in prayer.
The phrasing around “Western Renewal” may seem innocuous, perhaps even positive, to the uninitiated. But the veiled language of “Western Renewal” is steeped in a history of far-right, often antisemitic, politics, and it is used today as a dogwhistle by groups hellbent on stemming “undesirable” immigration and rejecting the very concept of multiculturalism for a return to more “traditional” and racially, ethnically, culturally homogenous societies. In particular, the language of “Western Renewal” is popular in extreme spaces like 4Chan. As extremism researcher Cathrine Thorleifsson wrote in November 2021, “on [the 4Chan forum] /pol/, it is evident that the fascist new order and the regeneration of the ultra-nation are conceived in transnational terms of European or Western renewal as a whole, thus promoting violent action globally.”
As Thorleiffson writes, ultranationalism, and the “ultra-nation” can be understood as nationalism that takes on a quasi-religious, if not outright religious, character. Something right at home at CPAC Texas, where Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick asserted that the constitution was literally written by God before leading the crowd in prayer. Per Thorleiffson, the relationship between fascism and the idea of the “ultra-nation” can be situated through the conceptualization of fascism proposed by British historian and political theorist Roger Griffin, which frames fascism as an ideology characterized by populist ultranationalism that contains mythical ideas of national revival, often hearkening to a lost, racially coded past.
Members of the Republicans for National Renewal have ties to white supremacists and other extremists. As reported by The Daily Beast in November 2021, the grassroots director of Republicans for National Renewal formerly hosted a neo-Nazi themed podcast called “Blood, Soil, and Liberty” with a member of a now-defunct white supremacist group, Identity Evropa. This event was not an outlier. The same ADL article from June describes Republicans for National Renewal’s numerous connections to a variety of extremists, some of whom speak in openly antisemitic terms.
Among those extremists with links to Republicans for National Renewal is Jack Posobiec. Posboeic, a far-right, conspiracy-theory-peddling media personality whose ties to neo-Nazis and other extremists have been extensively documented by the Southern Poverty Law Center, had a prime speaking spot at CPAC Texas. He used the opportunity to promote what he calls the “New Right,” a clear attempt to rebrand the hateful “alt-right” term that has declined in use in recent years.
If CPAC Texas is any indicator, there isn’t much new about the “New Right”—except, perhaps, its growing internationalism. But Orban speaking at CPAC Texas is less of a beginning for this international right-wing movement than a culmination, not unlike how a mushroom cap is just the most visible part of a deeper mycological network. The authors of the book The International Alt-Right: Fascism for the 21st Century? trace the transnational quality of the alt-right across Europe, as well as in countries as diverse as Japan, India, and Russia. Through an examination of the history of the alt-right and its various ideological strains, they draw out the distinctly nativist quality of the movement, which often manifests as a politics of white supremacy, and they elucidate the modern tactics the movement uses to spread its ideas, such as “meme warfare.”
As the authors of The International Alt-Right define it, the Alt-Right’s core belief is that “‘white identity’ is under attack from pro-multicultural and liberal elites and so-called ‘social justice warriors’ (SJWs) who allegedly use ‘political correctness’ to undermine Western civilization and the rights of white males.”
And indeed, if you were sitting in the audience at CPAC Texas, that’s not far from the sort of narrative you would have heard.
“A new Marxism has infiltrated all parts of our lives as a master thief,” said Szantho. “It wears many cloaks, depending on what seems most effective. It appears as BLM, the cult of radical race theory, or gender ideology, and what was once known as progressive. Better called by its name, Marxism.”
Even if its headline American representative is no longer in office, the emboldened Nationalist International and international alt-right should concern American antifascists. Autocratic leaders like Orban have more ability to play the long game, and their commitment to hardline nationalist agendas hasn’t faded during the Biden presidency in the slightest. Trump won millions of votes in 2020, and the brand of ultranationalism he helped foster in this and other countries is here to stay for the foreseeable future.