Whether they were called progressives, woke or social justice warriors, they reflected an illiberal extreme that could not mesh with what were once-liberal values, tolerance, respect for differing views and the defense of rights, even when it meant fighting for the rights of your adversaries. It wasn’t that liberals wouldn’t let them into the big tent, but that they refused to be in a big tent with heretics, people who failed to meet their ideological purity test.
Conservatives find themselves in the same situation with the “groypers.”
Legitimate differences and debates exist among authentic conservatives. Although conservatives certainly reject socialism, there is no canonical conservative position on, for example, how much regulation of markets is desirable. Some conservatives lean heavily in the direction of strict libertarianism; others allow more room for government interventions in the economy.
Similarly, while conservatives generally believe that America should support other democracies, especially where they are under threat, conservatives have a range of perspectives on the question of how interventionist or noninterventionist U.S. foreign policy should be.
If you’ve already started to feel the irony, it may have to do with two things. The first is that liberals and conservatives are closer with each other than either is with their extreme fringe. We can agree to disagree. We can agree on principle while vehemently disagreeing on where the lines should be drawn. We can respect our respective positions while disagreeing, as both being patriotic and putting the nation ahead of party or self-interest.
Which leads directly into the second point, that none of this sounds remotely like anything relating to Trump. He’s surely no liberal, and yet he’s using government power to coerce businesses, if not seize a piece of the means of production. But he’s similarly no conservative, abandoning our democratic ally, Ukraine, for a commie dictator, even though Putin treats him like his stupid bitch. He wants peace to get the one trinket he can’t steal while threatening to invade Venezuela, which is suffering a boat shortage.
But the glaring gap in principle leaves a hole to be filled in Trump’s ideological desert, and though he pretends to be conservative, it’s the groypers who want to fill that hole. Princeton University Prof. Robert George issues a warning about who is being let into the big tent of conservatism.
Still, there are limits.
Those limits are reached when people claiming the mantle of conservatism promote white supremacy, antisemitism, eugenics, the subjugation of women, and other forms of ideological extremism and bigotry.
So-called “groypers,” such as the Hitler (and Stalin) sympathizer Nick Fuentes, want to be inside the tent, and they make no secret of their aim to take control of and remake the conservative movement.
Like the Democrats, the Republicans, once the party of conservatives, is having an internal struggle about what to do with their extremist fringe.
Even conservatives who are appalled by the grotesque ideologies of Fuentes and his allies sometimes seem uncertain about how to deal with the phenomenon. They note that illiberal “influencers” have large online followings, especially among disaffected young men, and fear alienating them if they draw a bright line excluding racists and antisemites from membership in good standing in the conservative community.
But drawing a bright line is exactly what we need to do — immediately.
Liberals, for whom the Republican Party offers neither place nor comfort, find the failure of the Democratic Party to come to grips with the internal schism with illiberal progressives untenable. While George speaks in terms of conservatives, is he of the view that the Republican Party is still their home? Almost every principled conservative, from Robert George to George Will, has rejected Trump and his MAGA faithful as representative of anything remotely resembling principled conservatism.
As Trump has seized the Republican Party, calling anyone who challenges him RINO, stupid or weak, there is no longer a place for principled conservatives under the Trump Tent. But like us liberals, conservatives haven’t given up completely and, bad as the current status may be, recognize that it could get worse. Much worse.
Extremism and bigotry have no place in the conservative movement. They are contrary to the central things conservatives should be dedicating themselves to conserving, namely, the biblical principle of the inherent dignity of every member of the human family, and the civic principle that human beings are “created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”
The state of the Republican Party is bad enough already, but hope springs eternal that when Trump finally goes away, it can return to a party of principled conservatism rather than a party of extremism and bigotry. What would that party look like?
There is, of course, more to American conservatism — belief in the rule of law; in the nation’s republican civic order; in accountable and limited government; in marriage and the family; in the importance of flourishing institutions of civil society; in traditional moral values, personal responsibility, and rewarding effort and achievement; in the constitutional principles of federalism and the separation of powers; in basic civil rights and liberties; in the market-based economy; in a sensible system of legal immigration, and in opposition to illegal immigration; in maintaining a healthy physical environment for everyone and a moral ecology suitable for the rearing of children; in a strong national defense and a sensible understanding of America’s leadership role in the world.
There is much in there to trouble a liberal and with which we would fight to counter. But the fight would be within what we once accepted as a reasonable Overton Window of political disagreement. There are areas of agreement, even if they require compromise, and agreement and compromise would not be seen as intolerable political weakness, but as good and decent people trying to reach consensus for the sake of a nation. Neither groypers nor the woke have any desire to let this happen. Just as liberals should reject the woke, conservatives should reject the groypers. Neither can be the future of America if there will be an America.
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Your best writin’ this time of year is usually on Saturdays. Why are you a day early?
[Ed. Note: Aww.]
Never heard the word “Groypers”, and wondered where it came from. Wikipedia to the rescue: “They are named after a variant of Pepe the Frog, an Internet meme.”
We grow to hate each other a little more each day.
[Ed. Note: “We”? Who is “we”?]
If you want to learn about the Groypers, reading about them in the Washington Post probably isn’t your best bet.
Nick Fuentes is not just another groyper. The groypers are his followers and he created the movement. Fuentes has discussed his ideas in numerous interviews with mainstream figures, and he has a show on Rumble where he says what he’s thinking. News flash; it’s substantially different from what you are reading in the mainstream press. He has some ideas that seem silly and even objectionable to this 60-year-old libertarian, but it’s easy to see why he appeals to young men, and it’s extremely likely that he will have a substantial influence on the Conservative movement, and on the Republican party, over the next decade.
Fuentes is an incredibly talented entertainer and debater (basically a young Donald Trump), and he forced his way into the public consciousness. The establishment desperately tried to cancel him, and they failed because people wanted to hear what he was saying. If you listen to his discussion of how he was radicalized (on Tucker and elsewhere) you will see that he is a product of cancel culture. He started out as a conventional conservative asking questions about why Israel has so much influence over US politicians, and was driven out of the mainstream after he refused to obey orders to stop talking about that.
The good news is that the groypers have not adopted the tactics of the far left. They aren’t burning down buildings nor attacking police. They aren’t claiming that speech with which they disagree is the same as violence. They don’t censor their opponents, partly because they don’t have access to the levers of power, but also they seem to recognize that censorship always backfires. Fuentes explicitly condemns violence, property damage, and doxing. These tactics were very successful for the far left, until the inevitable backlash of which the groypers are a part.
The groypers have 2 primary tactics:
1. Argument. They show up in large numbers at public events (i.e. TPUSA) and ask questions that reflect their views.
2. Voting and being willing to make their party lose. They pick Republicans who they believe are not sufficiently “America First” and campaign and vote against them in primaries, and then campaign and vote against them in the general if they win the primary.
[Ed. Note: I’m shocked, SHOCKED, that you’re so sympathetic toward Fuentes and groypers.]
Now most people who live in the real world will read the first few sentences of this piece and, upon seeing that his worldview has led him to place progressives and Holocaust-deniers in the same category, will dismiss the author as a crank. But I am built different; I am a connoisseur of clueless reactionaries who cannot discern truth from lies.
It’s just reassuring to see you’re still at it, Scott, having not learned your lesson from interviewing sedulous liar Mike Cernovich, and breathlessly promoting his “scoops” about Obama spying on Trump’s campaign (OOPS all bullshit!). Or from promoting the Sokol Square fraud because you agreed with the pre-determined conclusion they managed to lie their way into reaching.
But why not go full Whomas Tatterton Chilliams and say “woke right”? I guess you don’t want to seem as deluded as people who throw others out of their French chateaus for the crime of saying unflattering things about Bari Weiss.
Anyway keep on flingin’ it Scott. Leave liberalism to the actual liberals. Cheers!
[Ed. Note: It’s good to see the bookend to PGP’s delusions, lest anyone doubt the point of the post.]
If I didn’t know better, I would think you paid somebody off to post these insane comments. Too funny.
Perspective is a hell of a thing. Historically speaking, or so my education in the Western academic tradition with a dose of American exceptionalism instructed, your relative liberalism and this principled conservatism you speak of are both forms of classical liberalism, being products of the enlightenment and progression from monarchism and totalitarian regimes to representative democracy and republicanism. You and they merely disagree on how to implement the ideologies. Those to your left say you’re stuck in the past. Those to your right say you’re going beyond the confines of classical liberalism. You being just left of center, maybe, naturally produce the view that many groups on both sides have gone wildly astray.
From the outside looking towards this center, conservatives and liberals do become a uniparty. Like the universe expanding, our politics and society are going further and further afield in all directions. In that light, the “real world” can easily lose its distinctions and nuances altogether like when trying to tell two people apart at a far distance. Likewise, these Groyper types and “woke” are easy to cast as similar from the inside looking out, but they and the issues are far more intricate than what you present. Each should be taken on their own terms or else risk committing their sin of lumping unlike together with unlike.
From where I stand at least for this comment, you, PGP, and DM Beano are each committing to mere perspective, which is understandable yet boring.
If you’d like to effectively combat these groups you deem outsiders, SHG, then your lot should unify with the principled conservatives who at base agree with you. Getting yourselves surrounded like this is not a wise move tactically or strategically. Don’t worry too much, though. From my perspective, you’ve already lost.
You’re right. The right/left false dichotomy is failing along with the MSM that successfully enforced it for decades. The new division is establishment vs people, and the people who mindlessly believe the MSM telling them to support the agenda of their would-be rulers are aging out. The establishment is desperately trying to control the new media ecosystem in order to get control over the youth. Will they succeed? It’s hard to tell. So far they seem to be failing miserably, but let’s not underestimate them.
[Ed. Note: How nice that you and PK are now BFFs.]
Hi, BFF. I’m glad you agree with me, but you misunderstand me, my comment, and its purpose, and annoyingly so. Everything after “You’re right,” I reject entirely.
By and by, you’re echoing good ole fashioned Marxism. Replace establishment with bourgeoisie and people with proletariat and reevaluate, comrade. It’s an old division.