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TWO YOUNG men, Andreas Palmlov and Julian Kroon, sit in a bar swapping anecdotes about their native Sweden. The welfare system is so lax that an immigrant drew benefits while serving as the defence minister of Iraq. A lecturer was suspended because students complained that a lesson about fatherhood was heteronormative. And 1m kroner ($116,000) of taxpayers cash was lavished on art intended not for human eyes but those of birds and beetles.

Some of the details are disputed. The Iraqi politician, Najah al-Shammari, a Swedish citizen, denies committing benefit fraud. But stories like these help explain why Mr Palmlov and Mr Kroon are members of the Sweden Democrats, a nationalist party. They believe that Sweden is under threat: from immigrants who drain the welfare state, from radicals who undermine traditional values and from an establishment that stigmatises voices of common sense like their own.

Storytelling matters in politics. Voters remember a good yarn more easily than any statistic. And the Sweden Democrats tell a simple, emotive one: that non-European immigrants are ruining Sweden, and a left-wing government is letting them.

In 1988, when it was founded, the party was dismissed as a rabble of neo-Nazis. But since the 1990s it has purged overt racists and cleaned up its image. It gained momentum in 2015 when Sweden opened its doors to refugees, letting in over 160,000 (1.6% of the population), mostly from culturally distant places such as Syria and Afghanistan. The government mishandled the influx, showering the newcomers with handouts but making it hard for them to work. (For example, the de facto minimum wage in shops, hotels and restaurants is nearly 90% of the average wage in those industries, pricing newcomers who are still learning Swedish out of entry-level jobs.) The open-door policy was quickly reversed. But the sight of so many jobless Muslims lent credibility to the Sweden Democrats message. At an election in 2018, the party won 17.5% of the vote. To keep it out of power, mainstream parties have had to form unstable coalitions.

An upsurge in violence between ethnic gangs (see article) has given the Sweden Democrats another boost. The majority society is losing control over areas of Sweden, says Mattias Karlsson (pictured, with waistcoat), an MP and the partys unofficial chief ideologue. He wants to hire more police, pay them better and swiftly deport foreign criminals. When an Afghan commits a crime in Sweden, he says, human-rights people say we cant guarantee his safety in Afghanistan, so they let him out on the streets again.

An increase in recorded sex crimes is to a large extent cultural, says Mr Karlsson, noting that Sweden took in many refugees from sexist countries. Reality is more complicated. Sweden expanded its definition of rape in 2013, and counts it differently from other countries. If a woman says her boyfriend assaulted her daily for a year, Sweden records 365 offences; other countries might record only one. So the claim, common on alt-right websites, that immigration has made Sweden the rape capital of the world, is nonsense.

Still, crime rates among refugees really are higher than among native-born Swedes, partly because so many are jobless. Other parties approach the topic gingerly, for fear of sounding racist. The Sweden Democrats have no such hang-ups. We say what you think, is their slogan.

The party is planning for the long term. Its leaders swap notes with American Republicans. Mr Karlsson has set up a think-tank. Mr Kroon runs a fast-growing federation for students. Many are tired of political correctness, he says, and need a new home outside the opinion corridor of socially acceptable (ie, left-liberal) views.

At the national level, centre-right parties have resisted the temptation to cut a deal with the Sweden Democrats, though it would give them a swift path to power. But the taboo is fading. Local politicians have already taken the plunge. The Sweden Democrats enjoy power or a share of it in several towns, especially in the conservative south. Some of their local leaders are risibly incompetent. But others are eager to show that they are not scary and can handle the humdrum tasks of government.

The partys showcase is Solvesborg, a town of 17,000. The mayor, Louise Erixon, is the ex-partner of the partys national leader, Jimmie Akesson. She is popular, pro-business and unashamedly populist. She boasts of hiring more security guards, banning begging and barring visits to nursing homes to protect the elderly from covid-19. She favours drug tests in schools, and repatriation for immigrants who refuse to be a part of [Swedish] society. She accuses the mainstream parties of weakening good old Swedish togetherness. She is thought to have national ambitions.

Ms Erixon came to power thanks to a deal with the centre-right Moderate party, whose national leaders opposed it. But a local one, Emilie Pilthammar, went ahead, for bread-and-butter reasons. Ms Pilthammar says she wanted to bring down a cronyist left-wing administration, boost local business and provide more choice in child care. However she later fell out with Ms Erixon, who she says would give councillors only a few minutes to read key documents before making a decision on themsomething she says was bad for democracy. (Ms Erixon denies this.)

Mr Karlsson is very optimistic that the Sweden Democrats will gain a share of national power, perhaps after an election in 2022. Nils Karlson (no relation) of Ratio, a research institute, predicts that the centre-right will not join a formal coalition with them but might form a looser arrangement, whereby the Sweden Democrats consent to a centre-right government in exchange for policy concessions. That scares me a lot, he adds.

Meanwhile, the mainstream parties have all but adopted the Sweden Democrats policies on shutting out new refugees. Mattias Karlssons suggestion that Sweden does not send Afghans back to Afghanistan would come as news to Jacob (not his real name), who was deported last year. His claim to asylum appeared watertight: he arrived in Sweden as a 14-year-old orphan and a member of a persecuted minority. He had fled Afghanistan after his father disappeared (and was probably murdered by the Taliban). He has studied hard, learned Swedish and stayed out of trouble. He is now back in Kabul taking maths classes. Yesterday when I was in school, a rocket exploded outside. And again today. Its hard, he says. The Swedish family who took him in while he was in Sweden, the Winbergs, have found him a permanent job at a trendy vegetarian restaurant in Stockholm. In theory, he should get a work visa and be allowed to return. But Hans Winberg, an academic, frets that the government is doing everything it can to keep refugees out. The climate has changed, he says. This is painful to me as a Swede. But many Swedes welcome it.

This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline "On their way in"

Read more:
How long will Swedens nationalists be excluded from power? - The Economist

On the night of a recent Million MAGA March in Washington DC, a large man in a Proud Boys polo shirt runs at a Black woman from behind and punches her in the head. She falls to the pavement.

Russell Schultz sent video of the episode to CNN, saying the puncher should go to jail.

The sentiment is a bit of a shift for Mr Schultz, a former Proud Boy who's been filmed in street brawls himself and who often shows up at protests in Portland, Oregon, with a giant black flag that reads, "F--- ANTIFA."

Some have been filmed getting into street fights.

"Most of it is just to fight," Mr Schultz said.

"They want to join a gang. So they can go fight antifa and hurt people that they don't like, and feel justified in doing it."

Last year, he was indicted for rioting after a brawl between far-right protesters and anti-fascists in Portland.

He pleaded not guilty, and with another activist involved in the brawl - Joey Gibson of the right-wing group Patriot Prayer - he's filed a federal lawsuit against the Multnomah County district attorney, claiming they're being unfairly prosecuted because of their political beliefs.

Mr Schultz, 51, joined the Proud Boys in the fall of 2017 and left in May 2019. He says he quit, but the Proud Boys say he was "kicked out".

His exit should not be interpreted as a total repudiation of all the Proud Boys stand for, or a new enlightened state opposed to all political violence.

Mr Schultz still shows up at rallies, and he's still motivated by antipathy toward antifa.

The blurred line between what's ironic and what's sincere is a feature of the new far-right that was born on the internet in the Trump era. (Schultz said the word "joke" about three dozen times in the couple hours CNN interviewed him.)

It's harder for someone to be held accountable for what he believes if it's not clear what, exactly, he believes.

And it allows him to try on a persona with the safety valve of being able to say later it was all fake.

In person, Mr Schultz is mild-mannered and polite. In his old Proud Boys videos, he's menacing.

He now says he was just emulating the promo videos of professional wrestlers.

In 2017, Mr Schultz was at a free speech rally with Patriot Prayer.

"All (of a) sudden fights are breaking out all over the place, and here come marching across a field are these guys in black-and-yellow-striped polos," Mr Schultz said.

"And it, to me, it just looked like something from Braveheart."

They were the Proud Boys.

The "first degree" of membership in the Proud Boys is to declare you are one, which Mr Schultz later did.

The second degree is to be punched while reciting the names of five breakfast cereals, which he did, too.

"It was just a joke. No one hits hard," Mr Schultz says.

"The five breakfast cereals is a joke that's supposed to emulate getting beat into a gang.

"You know, it is just a spoof, a parody, but it got taken too far."

Here's another supposed joke: An ex-member recently said on the encrypted messaging app Telegram that he was staging a coup so Proud Boys would no longer capitulate to the left: "We recognise that the West was built by the White Race alone and we owe nothing to any other race."

Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio said there was no coup. Then both sides said they were just joking.

New wingmen and social media swagger

Mr Schultz is Jewish and says he voted for Barack Obama twice before voting for Mr Trump twice.

He liked the Proud Boys' joking and the drinking. But he began to notice some patterns among those who joined.

"They join the group now because it gives them a sense of belonging. They have this inner-person side that they want to be, but they're afraid to be.

"They're men who've never had wingmen before," he says.

"They're afraid to say what's on their mind for fear of getting into a fight. But if they have that guy or that group behind them, they're more bold in saying what they think, because they think someone has their back. ... The Proud Boys are the vehicle that attracts those people and accepts them in."

In the fragments of his social media presence left behind from his Proud Boys days (he got kicked off Facebook and Instagram), Mr Schultz's on-screen presence suggests he'd found the confidence to be quite outspoken.

Ahead of what he called a "pro-Jesus march" in December 2018, Mr Schultz posted a video warning antifa not to disrupt it. He says, in part:

"At the last rally I nearly ran over you with a car and I didn't feel bad about it one bit. You're lucky I didn't kill you because I wouldn't feel any remorse. ...

"You shoot me with faeces - I can't prove - you can't prove you didn't put something in it like HIV. ...

"I am going to shoot you. And here's where the best part of the odds is, I still have a chance to fight for my freedom in court. You don't have a chance to fight for your freedom cause you're f------ dead. See I'm going to shoot you in the chest or your head. Center mass. ...

"It might be in your best interest not to show up with faeces infested with HIV, whatever it is, and live, live so you can see what we're planning in 2019. Cause if you shoot us with faeces there's a good chance you might not survive to see 2019."

When CNN said these looked like violent threats, Mr Schultz defended them.

"They are violent threats and it's for good reason, too," he said.

"Antifa was saying they were going to come over and start throwing urine and faeces on us. And so that was my way of saying, 'OK, if you do that, that's a threat.' I don't know if it was AIDS-tainted. And I made that threat so they wouldn't come over. And they didn't come over. So, it worked."

Singled out by anti-fascist opponents

CNN reached out to Rose City Antifa, the Portland-area anti-fascist group, about these allegations.

"No one from our organisation threatened to throw poop at the Jesus thing. ... Rose City Antifa has never put AIDS in poop. Nor am I certain how one would do so."

This video had, in fact, been downloaded and posted by Rose City Antifa, which has been tracking Mr Schultz for years.

Though public protests are what get the most attention, most of what anti-fascists do - and Mr Schultz agrees with this - is online.

They research and document far-right activists they deem fascist and make that information public.

This resulting document is called a doxx - which can be a simple collection of biographical details but often functions as a kind of indictment, listing specific acts of racism or misogyny, as well as associations with other people deemed fascist.

In Mr Schultz's case, they made fliers about him and posted them around his neighborhood and his local bar.

"Violent Alt-Right Organiser In Your Area," the flier's headline reads.

"He was just one of the dudes in the crowd at rallies," explained A., an activist with Rose City Antifa who would not give a full name. (The vast majority of anti-fascist activists are anonymous, they say out of fear of far-right violence.)

"But outside of that context he's much more vocal, especially on social media."

Mr Schultz's social media presence was one of the most remarkable things about him, A. said, in that he made explicit threats.

Mr Schultz, in A.'s view, has "this 'I'm an operator' mindset that older right-wing men have. They get really into the idea (that) this is like their war - and thinking through and trying to get into the mind of the opposition.

"It's "very Rambo-y, but it also descends into a misogynistic and creeper vibe by listing all the terrible things they're going to do to you."

Included in Rose City Antifa's doxx of Mr Schultz is one of his old Facebook posts, which says, "Feminism only works on and when there are guys willing to f--- you."

Mr Schultz said this, too, was just a joke, just trolling.

In fact, he had a reputation for being "good at trolling," at saying things that would make antifa upset, Mr Schultz said.

"Like what you just mentioned, about women only have power as long as there's men willing to - you know - which, coming from me, with two beautiful daughters, you know, it's contrary to my whole life."

He explained all of his past commentary by saying: "Anything I ever did that was incendiary was so that (antifa) would see it and react to it."

He says he wanted more antifa activists to show up at right-wing rallies - not for the street battle, but for the more important media battle.

"I'm not baiting them into doing violence. I'm baiting them into showing up in enough numbers. Because when you see enough people in Black Bloc, people get scared," Mr Schultz said, referring to the activist tactic of wearing black clothes and face coverings to avoid identification.

"The people that aren't involved in (the protests), that don't think about it -- they see all these people looking like ISIS."

Consequences of an abandoned joke

A., of Rose City Antifa, said they did monitor the videos Mr Schultz and his comrades made as a way to gauge how many would turn out at their rallies and what their emotional state would be.

They took note when a far-right activist would give away a little more operational detail than he should have.

"I think a lot of people assume the end goal of doxxing is to get Nazis to not be Nazis anymore by convincing them of the flaws of their ideology," A. said.

"That's not necessarily the case."

There are other organisations that help deradicalise people. The main goal, A. said, is to provide a community resource to people directly affected by activists like Mr Schultz and "then present clear obstacles to their continued organising".

Before speaking to CNN, A. said, Rose City Antifa went through their old doxxes.

They see them as successful, particularly for the less prominent activists they've targeted.

"The older and slightly more marginal types - they really do not come around anymore."

Mr Schultz says he quit the Proud Boys in 2019 for a couple of reasons.

One, the men who wanted to climb the ranks of leadership were taking it too seriously, he says.

They were making a more formalised national hierarchy, Mr Schultz says, and he thought that would bring more intense scrutiny from law enforcement and reporters - and he worried that if one member committed a crime, they could all be liable for it.

Mr Schultz also felt pressure from one of his daughters to quit, he says.

The Proud Boys chairman says Mr Schultz was "kicked out," namely because he would "make a complete ass of himself" in videos on social media.

"Scorned ex-girlfriends are the worst. As soon as you break up with them, they want to lie to the world and say how small your equipment is," Mr Tarrio told CNN, in reference to Schultz.

"Currently there is no criminal activity happening in the Proud Boys."

Asked what Mr Tarrio would say about him, Mr Schultz said, "Oh, he'll probably talk crap about me. I don't care. ... Enrique always deflects."

As we watched the video of the man in the Proud Boys polo punch the woman in Washington, we asked Mr Schultz: Did he feel like he helped bring the nation to this point, with his propaganda?

"Yeah. Honestly, I had a role in it. I never advocated for the violence to come out of it, though."

In other words, he still says it was just a joke.

Read more:
Ex-Proud Boy on life inside the far-right group's ranks - 9News

I love the country but I cant stand the scene, Leonard Cohen croons in Democracy. Its been a beautiful autumn in Washington, DC: the sky a crisp blue, the fallen leaves as deeply red and orange as Ive seen them since I moved here five years ago. Yet to be American today is to identify painfully with Cohens sentiment. Those of us who love our country despite everything are nevertheless faced with the scene: hyper-partisanship, hypocrisy and the debasement of our democracy.

Now that the General Services Administration (GSA) has acknowledged Joe Biden as the apparent winner of the presidential election, meaning the Trump administration will, after weeks of delay, begin cooperating with Bidens transition team, it is tempting to conclude that Cohens lyric doesnt apply to the present after all. With Biden releasing the names of his appointees for cabinet and White House positions, you could imagine, despite the outgoing presidents efforts to sabotage it, that this was like any other presidential transition.

[see also: The divided heart of the GOP]

But the news that the handover is belatedly to commence does not make this a normal transfer of power. Though Donald Trump tweeted his support for the GSAs decision, he has not conceded, and pledged to continue his efforts to overturn the election result. His team is pursuing its legal challenges in battleground states and is reportedly attempting to pressure Republican-controlled legislatures in states won by Biden to appoint pro-Trump electors (in the hope that these electors might vote against the wishes of their respective states when the electoral college meets on 14 December).

Such attempted interventions have thus far come to little. Nevertheless, public condemnation on Capitol Hill of Trumps refusal to concede has, like so much else during his tenure, been highly partisan: very few of the nations leading Republican politicians have congratulated Biden on his victory. Richard Fontaine, the CEO of the DC-based Center for a New American Security think tank and a former foreign policy adviser to the late senator John McCain, told me that Republican senators are attempting to shift the sword of Damocles from their hand to the legal systems hand.

Republican senators and representatives know they should be behaving better, but dont care, a Democratic congressional aide told me. Many Republicans privately express dismay at Trumps antics, or at least say his attempts to overturn the result wont work. But publicly, they insist that he has the right to legally challenge the election. Of course, we hope that there would be more Republicans who would not stay silent. But its pretty dangerous that its now considered a profile in courage to just accept election results. That, to me, is such a low bar. Only in Washington would that be courageous, the aide observed.

[see also: What Trump wants now]

At some point, Trump will have to leave the White House. He lost the election, and his attempts to persuade the country otherwise are so unconvincing that even Chris Christie, the former Republican governor of New Jersey who helped Trump prepare for the first presidential debate, called the presidents legal team a national embarrassment. Yet the Trump administrations efforts to delay the transition and undermine the election result present a stubborn and wholly unnecessary threat to the country. Of course were going to get through this, Fontaine told me. But the way Trump is handling things imposes a cost. Theres a cost to how people will see this election, to the millions of people who believe Trump is fighting for them and are devastated by the outcome And it injects risk when you have a truncated transition.

The conduct of the outgoing president poses a potential threat to national security. The shortened transition after the 2000 presidential election, which was called in favour of George W Bush more than a month after polling day following a protracted recount dispute in Florida, has been cited as one of the factors that left the US more vulnerable to the 9/11 attacks the following year.

Trumps weeks-long refusal to cooperate with Bidens transition team also imperils the federal response to the pandemic. The Maine senator Susan Collins, one of a handful of Republicans to acknowledge Biden as president-elect, said it is absolutely crucial that the incoming administration has access to information on vaccine distribution. Any delay in that is obviously dangerous, the Democratic congressional aide told me. As if his mishandling of the public health crisis wasnt bad enough, Trump may also have hampered his successors ability to steer the country out of it.

[see also: Leader: The last days of Trump]

Trump may not be staging a coup at least not a successful one but his attempt to delegitimise the election also injects risk into US democracy, faith in which is being eroded with each day. This erosion will likely continue after Trump has left the White House. Trump is only a symptom of this rising alt-right, another congressional Democratic staffer told me. You have huge audiences following alt-right networks that dont believe Biden is legitimate.

Still, the staffer hoped there could be a positive outcome from this fraught transition: [Perhaps if] we can embrace the problem, we can talk about solutions that are larger than going back to normal, going back to decency. If Trumps conduct over the past weeks and years has revealed some of the darker truths about the parlous state of American democracy, it has also presented those who will succeed him with an opportunity to begin to reckon with these truths. Im neither left or right,/Im just staying home tonight,/getting lost in that hopeless little screen, Cohen sings. Im junk but Im still holding up/this little wild bouquet:/Democracy is coming to the USA.

Originally posted here:
The Biden transition is at last under way, but the delay could prove costly for US democracy - New Statesman

Courtesy of CPUSA

Political correctness has run amuck on college campuses, according to Ben Shapiro, a 34-year-old pro-Trump commentator who recently condemned the anti-fascist rallies held at universities across the nation over the last four years. These actions, organized by students themselves, have often prevented the public promotion of racist and transphobic doctrines by alt-right speakers.

But the action stretched far beyond the campus. The numbers are in, and after four years of Donald Trumps racist, extreme right, anti-science rhetoric, its clear that the youth have stood up in protest and in defense of democracy, both in the streets and at the ballot box.

Young voters nationwide supported Biden-Harris by 62% compared to 35% for Trump, according to the New York Times, even though in some states the majority of youth still went for Trump.

In some battleground swing states, the research center CIRCLE indicates, youth votes may have made the difference that enabled Democrats to carry the win by a small margin. For example, in Georgia, 21%of Biden-Harris votes came from young Georgians. They supported Biden-Harris over Trump by 18 percentage points, providing a 187,000 votes lead in the youth demographic.

The Black Lives Matter and Abolish ICE movements were as important as the pandemic in motivating many young Black and brown voters. Racism was the most important issue for 35% of young voters, notching out the pandemic, which ranked as the top priority for 34%, according to CIRCLEs analysis. Young Black voters supported Biden-Harris by a larger margin than Trump both in Georgia (nearly 90%) and nationwide (estimated at 86%).

NextGen, a grassroots voter registration campaign that was particularly active in the southwest, focused on getting all eligible young voters out to vote, including the more than 800,000 young Latinos who had turned 18 since the last presidential election.

Youth vote re-energized

Looking back to the primaries at the beginning of the year, note was made by many that the youth vote was down. This, of course, was before most of the COVID-related lockdowns across the country were implemented. Youth were expected to turn out in the millions for Bernie Sanders, but voter suppression took its toll, and the stakes did not seem as high at the time as they did a few weeks ago for the general election.

Few in February and March understood the severity of the pandemic or how long it would last. Even fewer anticipated how catastrophically Trump and the GOP would fail in their COVID-19 response. Young people werent expecting to get sent home from their college campuses to do online classes, nor were they expecting to be fired from their part-time or full-time jobs as a result of the economic crisis which followed.

But in late May, a wave of protests and mass demonstrations began as the Black Lives Matter movement responded to the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. This national anti-racist uprising continued throughout the summer. It sparked youth involvement in the democratic process by means of huge protests, sit-ins, and occupations of public property, including City Hall in New York City.

Over the summer the Defund the Police slogan of the BLM movement paralleled the Abolish ICE slogan that Latino youth in the Southwest pushed forward in their resistance to immigrant families being separated at the border and ultimately deported.

Young Communists swing into action

School started back up at the end of the summerthis time online or with a hybrid at-home/at-school schedule, and young people remained mobilized. During the first eight months of the pandemic, the Young Communist League, the Communist Party USAs youth branch, consolidated chapters across the country in the states of Virginia, Ohio, Colorado, New York, and Connecticut.

In these states, the YCL initiated mass recruitment campaigns that went hand-in-hand with voter registration efforts, mutual aid to feed and provide PPE to those in need, canvassing, and phone-banking. Communist banners were in the lead at four BLM protests over the summer.

The YCL in Ohio led the Vote for Tamir campaign with Samaria Rice, the mother of Tamir Rice. Tamir, a 12-year-old Black child, was shot by police in Cleveland in 2014. He would have been eligible to vote for the first time in this election. In New York, the YCL took part in canvassing field trips to Pennsylvania with other allies.

It all came together on Election Day. In response to mass unemployment, interrupted school schedules, canceled graduations, and an international uprising against racist police violence, the youth of this country turned out stronger than ever to defeat Trump and the extreme right danger he represented.

There is no basis for the explanation that the much higher youth participation in November compared to the primaries is due to Biden having more appeal for young people than Sanders did.

Bernies message of canceling student debt, a Green New Deal, universal healthcare, free tuition, defunding the police, and cutting the military budget remains a point of unity for millions of young people across this country. The youth want an alternative to the two parties, neither of which they feel represent them.

The youth must remain mobilized and organized in this next period, starting with preventing Trumps coup. Its important to remember that even with a Democratic majority in Congress and a Biden presidency, its really up to a movement of young workers and students to push this administration to carry out the program that inspired this youth upsurge.

As with all op-eds published by Peoples World, this article represents the opinions of its author.

Link:
Youth defend democracy at the ballot box and in the streets - People's World

Anyone who truly cares about the future of American democracy knows that we need a healthy Republican Party as well as a healthy Democratic Party. The two-party system has been corrupted by the emergence of special interest groups with lots of money and motivated voters, and even more by the application of computerized models to the task of redistricting. There are remedies to both those diseases, but no one has yet devised a plausible replacement for the two-party system.

What is the best future for the Republican Party? Last week, I called attention to a fine article by Robert Christian at Eureka Street in which he wrote:

The real mystery is over the future of the Republican Party. Will alt-Catholicism collapse without a president that affirms its illiberal, antidemocratic impulses? Will it find a new leader to champion its ideas? Will President Trump run again in 2024 or will one of his children take up the cause? We are unlikely to see Trumpian nationalism disappear, since this election was not a clear rejection of it. But its future and the role of Catholics in promoting it are murky right now. Some may double down, while others may pull away.

The happily-named Christian edits the online journal for young Catholics, Millennial, which should become a must-read for anyone who is serious about Catholic engagement with politics. And, here, he is right: The GOP first needs to decide if it is going to remain the party of Donald Trump or if it is going to try a less morally compromised alternative.

Christian argues the GOP should "build a more working class, diverse Republican Party that is guided by communitarian andwhole lifevalues. Instead of relying on the dark side of populism, this approach would seek to reshape the party by promoting pro-family policies on issues like childcare and economic security, while displaying a more consistent commitment to protecting human life."

This is plausible with one significant correction: It is next to impossible to imagine a Republican Party that is communitarian. One of the commitments that stretches across the entire party is a commitment to individual liberty. It is a bridge too far to expect the party to replace that commitment with communitarian values.

The GOP of the future could, however, embrace liberty in the manner of the great founder of modern conservative politics, Edmund Burke. I have been rereading the outstanding intellectual biography of Burke, The Great Melody by Conor Cruise O'Brien. You will recognize the title from Yeats' poem, "The Seven Sages," in which he writes:

The First. American colonies, Ireland, France and IndiaHarried, and Burke's great melody against it.

Yeats discerned, and O'Brien explains, what Burke's many critics could not, that he was no mere reactionary. Burke's sympathy with the American Revolution (and for that matter with the English Revolution of the previous century) and his antipathy to the French were of a piece, that he saw the American Revolution as an effort to conserve liberties already enjoyed, while there was something dangerous, something totalitarian, at work in the French Revolution. Similarly, Burke's love for the people of his native Ireland and his hatred for the East India Company were of a piece too, both emotions stirred by a disgust with arbitrary authority or tyranny.

O'Brien may have overreached in arguing that Burke was truly a liberal pluralist. (He published a fascinating correspondence with Isaiah Berlin on the subject at the end of the book.) But he is correct to cite Philippe Raynaud who said of the Burke: "A la fois liberale et contre-revolutionnaire," that is "simultaneously liberal and a counter-revolutionary." Here is a potential future for the Republican Party.

By "liberal" in this context, we do not mean aligned with what passes for liberalism in America today. We mean committed to liberty as a fundamental value in public life. Burke did not share the negative conception of liberty that animated the Founding Fathers. For him, the liberty that mattered was the liberty embedded in the customs and circumstances of a people and it was ordered, that is, legitimate when disposed to the good or the true. He would not have flown a "Don't tread on me" flag, but he would have respected the conception of liberty the flag conveyed for Americans of his day.

It is not possible for Republicans to embrace Burke's conception of liberty in its entirety, but they could leverage it against the libertarian iteration of freedom that must be abandoned by the GOP and by the Democrats too! Sadly, even the public health crisis through which we are passing has not caused some people to recognize the limits of libertarianism. The Planned Parenthood worker-turned-pro-life activist Abby Johnson posted this tweet:

To which someone thoughtfully tagged: #MyBodyMyChoice. The joke cuts both ways: The libertarian arguments for liberal abortion are identical to the libertarian arguments against wearing a mask.

As for the "counter-revolutionary" side of Burke, I am reasonably confident that Democrats will give Republicans ample opportunity to charge that a cultural revolution is afoot. From the cranks who refuse to abandon the slogan "Defund the police!" even though they admit they do not actually want to defund the police, to the academics who "call out" those who fail the latest test of wokeness, to those so-called liberals who put the words religious liberty in scare quotes, apparently unaware that the doctrine of religious liberty is one of liberalism's greatest achievements, there are those on the left who, like the Jacobins of old, have a totalitarian itch that they love to scratch. The American people, in their wisdom, will resist any party that comes to be dominated by such faux liberals, but I am not sure the Democratic Party will be able to resist for long. Apres Biden, le deluge!

Burke was a contemporary of without being a child of the Enlightenment, but he differed from Johann Gottfried Herder, and Giambattista Vico and Joseph de Maistre in that he never crafted a full-blown philosophy against the Enlightenment: He resisted theory when it clashed with practice, and in this sense was a kindred spirit to America's pragmatic bent. He detested tyranny but worried that any violent overthrow of social custom invited tyranny as much as it might eradicate it. He also knew that more pedestrian human vices like greed and lust could oppress a people as easily as any theory. He was not a systemic thinker, and critics in his day and since have charged him with inconsistency. Certainly, if the Republican Party of the future needs a synthesis between the Enlightenment ideals of the Founding Fathers and the Christian faith espoused by their base, they will not find it in Burke or anywhere else. In the third century of modernity, we Christian moderns still await a new Aquinas who can fashion such a synthesis, or we need admit none can be fashioned.

Still, the Republican Party would have a better chance of regaining some semblance of a moral compass after this debacle of Trumpism if all of its leading members were to sit down and read O'Brien's biography of Burke, or read Burke himself. There really has never been a Burkean conservative party in this country, and maybe one is not possible. It is worth the effort, and it surely beats descending back into alt-right Trumpism.

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Originally posted here:
The GOP's future? Ditch Trump and read Edmund Burke - National Catholic Reporter