Defeating Groyperism on Conservative Terms

American popular culture since at least the 1950s has fetishized rebellion. But what’s left to rebel against in the 21st century?

None of the traditional sources of authority or repression hold much sway today: not the church, not parents, not hierarchies of taste or class. Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll are now just passé Boomer recreations. Yet American society is not without a rigid morality that imposes itself on everyone, and on some—young men in particular—much more than others.

The modern dogma that regulates everything from sex to speech is liberalism. What happens when the all-American love of rebellion meets this dogma? You get a generation in revolt against liberalism’s strictures. And like earlier generations that revolted against Christianity and bourgeois respectability, the radical youth of this generation embrace whatever is shockingly offensive to the old prudes.

Hierarchical marriage—the “trad wife”—is as much a rejection of today’s norms as sex outside marriage was of the old norms. Affirming traditional religion is now the kind of rebellion that rejecting the same used to be. Feminism is repressive, so the “manosphere” becomes liberation. Antiracism is humorless, so “The Will Stancil Show,” in all its ugliness, is an underground hit.

When heavy metal bands and avant-garde artists wanted to prove just how radical they were in a Christian culture, they at times embraced outright Satanism. The more authorities denounced such material, the more potent and attractive it became as a symbol of rebellion. (And “cool” parents who tried to empathize with their offsprings’ offensive tastes only earned contempt: they came off like phonies and hypocrites.)

In a culture where liberal progressivism is the established religion, however, the most extreme rebels turn to outright Nazism. Like the Satanists of an earlier day, they can make profitable careers by doing so.

Nick Fuentes is one case in point. That’s not to doubt the sincerity of his malice—he means what he says. His professed admiration for Josef Stalin as well as Adolf Hitler isn’t puzzling: these are twin symbols of a complete, mocking rejection of liberalism.

The liberal response to Groyperism, the ideology of Fuentes’s fandom, only fuels the phenomenon. Liberal authority itself is the cause of Groyperism: to fight the latter, one must confront the former.

The “post-liberals” demonized by progressives and certain conservatives are not a gateway to Groyperism—they are one of the few effective barriers against it. Catholic “integralists,” national conservatives, and theologically minded “Red Tories” in the vein of Phillip Blond (to name just a few varieties of post-liberalism) present deeper and more biting criticisms of liberalism than anti-Semitic Internet influencers can muster, though to be sure such seriousness is an obstacle to reaching those young people drawn to rebellion for the fun of it.

Leo Strauss might also yield answers to the nihilistic tendencies among today’s young Right, not least with his prescription to return to classical political philosophy. But Strauss has long been misread by liberals (and not a few on the Right) as a mere liberal himself, when he isn’t being dismissed as a crypto-fascist. Harry Jaffa and the “West Coast” school of Straussian thought have suffered a similar fate—damned on one side by those who see Jaffa’s defense of equality as an endorsement of left-wing egalitarianism and on the other by those who deem the Claremont Institute that carries on his work an “illiberal” threat to democracy.

Tucker Carlson’s interview with Fuentes set off what might look like a civil war on the Right, both online and in institutions. But the conceptual battlefield on which the action is taking place is almost entirely liberal, a fact with dire implications both for conservatives caught up in the fighting and for Jews themselves.

Fighting on Liberalism’s Own Turf

For decades, campaigns against anti-Semitism, including those waged by conservatives, have relied on progressive liberalism’s master narrative and the techniques by which that narrative is enforced. The narrative divides the world into oppressors and victims. Jews have certainly been victims in countless horrific historical episodes, the worst of which was the Holocaust.

As progressive liberalism would have it, however, oppressors are not only active persecutors like the Nazis and their avowed admirers like Fuentes. Just as anti-racism demands the cancellation not only of racists but of anyone who is not sufficiently deferential to the self-appointed champions of anti-racism—anyone not willing to censor enough as well as censure those whom activists accuse of racism—so the fight against anti-Semitism, conducted on liberal grounds, requires the cancellation not only of Nick Fuentes but of anyone who dares question or resist attempts to cancel Tucker Carlson as well.

No one has actually accused Kevin Roberts, the president of The Heritage Foundation, of being an anti-Semite. But the liberal victim-oppressor-savior narrative defines mortal sin in broader terms, as insufficient willingness to demonstrate anti-racism or opposition to anti-Semitism in the manner activists demand.

Conservatives who adopt this approach should recognize that they are inevitably condemning themselves. Do they cooperate thoroughly and enthusiastically enough with anti-racism campaigns to satisfy the gatekeepers of anti-racism? Are they sufficiently in sympathy and solidarity with other victim groups of all kinds?

The point is not that all cases of victims and oppressors are identical but rather that embracing the master narrative and its enforcement procedures is suicidal for conservatives. If they are not consistent, and they apply the framework to some victim groups but not others, they will be found guilty of the same moral crimes they accuse others of. Their hypocrisy will further undermine their authority in the eyes of the young and will make their accusations appear to be dishonest power plays.

Yet if, on the other hand, conservatives strive for consistency within the victims-oppressors-saviors narrative, they will find themselves steadily pulled to the left, as they are forced to admit that the universe of victim groups is very large indeed and the measures necessary to condemn all oppressors—which, again, means everyone who is not on the correct side of the narrative—are limitless. Nothing short of “going woke” will make conservatives consistent enough for progressive liberalism’s framework, and the closer conservatives come to that point, the less conservative they are.

This is one reason paleoconservatives—including Jewish ones such as Paul Gottfried, the editor of Chronicles—have long opposed responding to anti-Semitism through the framework and techniques devised by liberals. That framework applies to every group, not just Jews, and accepting it for their sake leads one by concession to accept it universally.

Liberal Universalism Corrodes Particularity

Lest liberals misinterpret any of this: racism is as real as anti-Semitism, both are bad (for reasons that go beyond liberalism), and of course blacks as well as Jews and other minorities have been victims of many injustices. But those facts do not require us to adopt the liberal narrative, with its politically weaponized framing of sensitivity, solidarity, deference, and cooperation. One can abjure racism and racists, anti-Semitism and anti-Semites, in other ways.

Yet it’s understandable why even many conservative defenders of Jews and Israel adopt a liberal framework—it’s the dominant framework in American education and media, after all, and is dominant in Europe as well. Why look for a non-liberal, right-wing answer to anti-Semitism when the liberal response is immediately available?

As the Groyper problem shows, however, using liberal arguments to fight anti-Semitism is counterproductive when defiance of liberalism is what’s presently invigorating anti-Semitism in the first place. Attaching the defense of Jews and Israel to the larger liberal project that leads to wokeism only encourages those who reject wokeism to look unfavorably on Jews and Israel.

What’s worse is that the master narrative, even when used in the short term for the defense of Jews, is ultimately incompatible with the survival of Judaism and Israel. Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism indicates why this is so. As the Holocaust recedes from living memory, the sense of Jews as victims is being displaced by a progressive liberal perception of Jews as oppressors. Israel is not and cannot be a fully liberal state, as liberalism is understood today. It cannot have mass immigration by non-Jews. It cannot be indifferent to religion. It cannot be soft on crime or terrorism. It must make hard friend-enemy distinctions inside as well as outside its borders.

None of that means Israel is less “liberal” than its neighbors. Yet from the perspective of American and European progressive liberalism, the conditions necessary for Israel to be Israel—the Jewish State—are morally unacceptable.

The center-left in the Democratic Party has tried to treat Israel as an “exception.” But the hard Left and those liberals in the center who cannot resist consistency are gradually eroding acceptance of Israel’s exceptionalism. This process has been decades in the making, and its logical end, sooner or later, will be to turn American and European liberals entirely against Israel. They will agree with the hard Left in seeing Israel as a settler-colonial apartheid state.

To affirm the exception would be to deny liberalism’s universal validity, which would amount to denying liberalism itself. One can be consistently liberal or one can be pro-Israel—but by the terms of liberalism’s progressive drift, one cannot be both.

What’s more, if Muslims and the developing world belong to the “oppressed” category, hostility to Israel will be acceptable in liberals’ eyes for the same reason urban crime appears excusable in light of white racism. The oppressed are not strictly bound by the nonviolent rules of liberalism, because liberalism exists to serve the oppressed, not the other way around.

The fact that the ultimate liberal indictment of Israel is also the liberal indictment of the West—of borders not open wide enough, of a majority population not sensitive and deferential enough to the oppressed, of land stolen from someone else (or, in the case of Europe, land that might more justly be transferred to oppressed newcomers than retained by the privileged natives)—suggests what role Israel and Zionism should play for the Western Right and for its critique of contemporary liberalism. Israel defies multiculturalism and national dissolution under globalization. Zionist Jews not only argue for but also live and fight for a land of their own. They are proud to stand apart from all others in their own home. That doesn’t mean they hate others, but they love what it means to be Jewish and to have a homeland.

There are elements of universalism in Judaism, of course, and the West has a very pronounced universalist tradition. But the West also has its distinct nations and peoples, and Israel and the Jewish people are tributes to and proofs of the enduring virtue of particularity. Ironically or not, through Israel Jews preserve something of the ancient polis in all its particularity—which may clash with the universality of Socratic philosophy, yet Socrates willingly yielded his own life to his city. The philosopher acknowledged the proper authority of the polis.

In recent centuries, liberalism has caused the West to lose its sense of the duty the universalist owes to the particular. Israel, however, reminds us of it.

The Right should see Israel, and Jews as a particular people, as allies against self-annihilating liberal universalism. That does not mean the Right can’t oppose various aspects of the U.S.-Israel relationship. But Israel’s existence is good for the Right regardless of how bad certain government policies (ours and theirs) might be. And the Jews are Israel, as a people or nation, not just as a state. That principle, too, holds great significance for the Right, though Europeans and Americans have different relationships to their own countries—different, but not entirely different.

Friends of Israel need the Right, too. They need it to stop liberal universalism from undermining the Jewish State and reducing Jews, even in their own hearts and minds, to the status of one culture among infinitely many: not a nation or a people but just an “identity,” and one labeled unrighteous by more numerous identity groups.

Yet accepting that Israel needs the Western Right entails compromise. It means respecting particular national interests when they diverge. And while it never calls for tolerance of actual anti-Semites, it does mean eschewing the concatenations of blame characteristic of the liberal narrative. It’s more important that Israel have friends who are right-wing and effective in criticizing liberalism than that it have a liberal-style “anti-racist” machine of its own in the United States.

What will beat Groyperism is what defeats left-wing globalism, too: a Right that’s particularist, opposed to progressive liberalism, and fortified by Israel’s example.

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