Over the weekend, a group of right-wing extremists from across Europe and the United States met at a Holiday Inn in St. Petersburg. They were there to attend the first convention of the International Russian Conservative Forum—an organization founded by the pro-Vladimir Putin Rodina Party, whose purpose is to create the kind of foreign support for the Russian war in Ukraine that the Communist International mobilized on behalf of the Soviet Union. (Call it the Conintern.) A paramilitary band of Cossacks, armed with leather whips, provided security outside the hall. Inside, fringe political characters from Germany, Italy, Britain, the U.S., and other countries spoke of their devotion to Putin and Europe’s Christian traditions, while expressing contempt for the European Union and denouncing the American way of life, which meant homosexuality, multiculturalism, globalization, and “feminized men.”
The Golden Dawn, a radical right-wing Greek party, was there, but Marine Le Pen’s French National Front, in spite of its coziness with Putin, stayed away, as part of an image makeover. This was, after all, essentially a collection of Fascists, and if most of the participants claimed to reject the label (not all—Italy’s Roberto Fiore, of the Forza Nuova, insisted on the distinction between Fascism and Nazism) it’s only because “Fascist” has become Putin’s fundamental term of abuse for the elected government of Ukraine. According to the International Russian Conservative Forum, the Fascists are in Kiev, and also in Brussels. “The E.U. are Nazis,” Jim Dowson, a Scottish anti-abortion activist, said. With lavish celebrations of the seventieth anniversary of V-E Day just weeks away, Russia was hailed as the Continent’s protector against this new, squishy, mongrelized, morally debased version of the Second World War-era threat. Fascists in St. Petersburg vilified “Fascists.”
What unites this loose tribe of anti-Semites, homophobes, fundamentalists, power worshipers, militarists, and mystics is a hatred of liberalism—a social order based on individual rights, pluralism, tolerance, and international coöperation. They’re marginal figures at best, not without comic potential, and individually they’re probably not worth discussing, if only they didn’t constitute the extreme tip of a global reaction against liberalism. This reaction is the most powerful political force of our time, not just in terms of its electoral success but in its intellectual self-confidence and persuasiveness. And it has little in the way of comic value. It springs from diverse causes in different places and can take widely different forms—far from all of them Fascist, and some of them mutually hostile. We see versions of it in China’s reversion toward Maoism under Xi Jinping; in the rise of the National Front (most recently in Sunday’s local elections) and other European parties on the far right and far left; in the Islamist authoritarianism of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan; in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rejection of a two-state solution in his triumphant campaign last week, and in the abandonment, by some of his American supporters, of Israeli democracy as a value; in the Iranian clerical leadership’s doctrinaire hostility to “Western” ideas; and, in this country, in the resurgence of American exceptionalism as a galvanizing force on the Republican right. (Senator Ted Cruz, who just became the first announced Republican Presidential candidate, makes George W. Bush seem like a one-world humanitarian.)
This reaction knows no partisan or national affiliation, and transcends ordinary ideological divides. Its Venezuelan adherents, who call themselves revolutionary leftists, have made common cause with Russian conservatives and Iranian theocrats. No one in American politics resembles Putin more than Cruz, who regularly denounces the Russian leader (along with Barack Obama for not standing up to him). The Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov is an Islamist who organized violent protests against Charlie Hebdo after the January 7th attack in Paris; he’s also a loyal soldier for Putin, an anti-Islamist who counts support for Bashar al-Assad as necessary in the fight against terrorism. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Iranian Supreme Leader, is an unelected anti-Semite, but he and Netanyahu, the elected leader of the Jewish state, speak a similar language of unquestionable national destiny that overlooks the reality of the millions of people who don’t fit within it.
No single word can quite do justice to the variety and reach of the reaction. The leaders and movements I’ve named above are joined by what they’re against more than by what they’re for. They despise the weakness and moral flabbiness of their liberal opponents. They discount the importance of minority views—criticism is considered illegitimate. They hate the creeping pace, the flawed compromises, and the muddled outcomes of democratic politics. They build their support on the many failures of liberal societies, from crime, social decline, economic stagnation, and political paralysis to terrorism, inconclusive wars, and the impotence of international organizations. They stoke a perpetual sense of grievance rooted in history, which requires an external enemy, and also an internal one. The internal enemy (immigrants, Jews, gays, political dissidents) is, in fact, alien to the nation, and the source of all that ails its essential goodness. To the most complex problems they offer the simplest solutions, promising unity, renewal, regeneration, a return to origins, a purification of the nation through the internal enemy’s expulsion and the external enemy’s defeat. Perhaps the best word for it is nationalism.
Nationalism usually means blind support for one’s country, but it doesn’t require a nation-state. These days, one of the most potent and volatile forms of nationalism is Islamism, which crosses and erases borders. In the broadest sense, it means allegiance to one’s group: allegiance without shades of gray, excluding the claims of other groups; allegiance in the pursuit of power as the group’s right; allegiance regardless of the facts. Nationalism transcends states, and individuals everywhere carry its seeds. We’re all tribal; we all have loyalties and biases; we all harbor an unexamined and indefensible sense of belonging to the chosen group. There’s a little Putin in everyone, forever picking at old scabs, whipping up team spirit, settling scores—us against them, a hateful sort of love. Acknowledging these things is the only antidote to being governed by them.
Nationalism can break out like a fever—just think of this country after the attacks of September 11th, with all the folly and tragedy that resulted. If we now see nationalism on the rise and liberalism in retreat in so many places, it has something to do with those years, when America acted as if it had the wisdom and the power to remake the world in an image of itself. American nationalism, which flared up in the name of liberalism, did lasting damage to that name. The damage weakened America’s ability to speak for the idea of liberal society while emboldening its true enemies.
