The Hate That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Anne Applebaum struggles to see what’s right in front of her nose:

The security strategy also talks, bizarrely, about Europe being on the verge of “civilizational erasure,” which is not language used by many European politicians, even those in far-right parties. Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister and foreign minister, has called this sentiment “to the right of the extreme right.” In multiple indices, after all—health, happiness, standard of living—European countries regularly rank higher than the United States. Compared with Americans, Europeans live longer, are less likely to be living on the streets, and are less likely to die in mass shootings.

The only possible conclusion: The authors of this document don’t know much about Europe, or don’t care to find out. Living in a fantasy world, they are blind to real dangers. They invent fictional threats. Their information comes from conspiracist websites and random accounts on X, and if they use these fictions to run policy, then all kinds of disasters could await us. Will our military really stop working with allies with whom we have cooperated for decades? Will the FBI stop looking for Russian and Chinese spies? Earlier this month, the Justice Department announced that it was taking action against two Russian state-sponsored cybercriminal groups that, among other things, targeted American industrial infrastructure. But if our real enemy is “civilizational erasure” in Europe, then surely we should redirect resources away from this kind of secondary problem and focus them on the threat posed by the British Labour Party or the German Christian Democrats.

One is tempted to laugh at these kinds of ideas, to express incredulity or turn away. But similar conspiracist thinking has already done real damage to real institutions. Elon Musk believed distorted or completely false stories about USAID that he read on his own X platform. As a result, he destroyed the entire organization so rapidly and so thoughtlessly that tens or even hundreds of thousands of people may die as a result. At the State Department, Darren Beattie, the undersecretary for public diplomacy, has repeatedly and falsely stated that the Global Engagement Center was censoring Americans, a fantasy that he encountered on the internet and that he continues to repeat without proof. As a result, he destroyed that organization and ended its international negotiations. He is now conducting an internal departmental witch hunt, trying to find or perhaps invent post hoc evidence for his conspiracist ideas.

Some elements of this story are familiar. Americans have overestimated, underestimated, or misunderstood their rivals before. And when they do, they make terrible mistakes. In 2003, many American analysts sincerely thought that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. During the Cold War, many analysts believed that the Soviet Union was stronger and less fragile than it proved to be. But I am not sure whether there has ever been a moment like this one, when the American government’s most prominent foreign-policy theorists have transferred their domestic obsessions to the outside world, projecting their own fears onto others. As a result, they are likely to misunderstand who could challenge, threaten, or even damage the United States in the near future. Their fantasy world endangers us all.

The other “only possible conclusion” is that the multiple authors of the newest National Security Strategy are raging white supremacists, an ideology that is indeed to the far right of the far right. She does almost understand where this “misunderstanding” is coming from:

At the same time, the document’s authors seem to derive their hatred of Europe from a series of false perceptions—or, perhaps, from a form of projection. The authors fear, for example, that “certain NATO members will become majority non-European” very soon. Because they are presumably not talking about non-European Turkey and Canada, the clear implication is that countries such as France and Germany have so much immigration from outside Europe that they will be majority nonwhite. And yet, it is the United States, not Europe, that is far more likely to become “majority minority” in the coming years.

But bizarrely, Elon Musk and Darren Beattie have no agency. It’s not their fault that they walk and talk and act like white supremacists. It’s the internet’s fault. The fault is in Twitter. The error is in the stars, not in ourselves. 

Or Musk and Beattie and the authors of the Trump Administration’s National Security Strategy, are all white supremacists who openly espouse the racist doctrine that non-whites are antithetical to “Western civilization,” and must be extirpated from same. I’m not sure how much more plainly they (and Stephen Miller, working right in the West Wing) have to say it. When I was a child, the enemy of the nation was Commies under the bed. White supremacy was at the extreme margins, and when we saw it in George Wallace or Orval Faubus or Pat Buchanan, we knew exactly what we were looking at. It was repulsive, but we knew. 60 years later, we dare not say? Why? Because there is no George Clooney of the GOP to first say it for us?

In that last quoted paragraph she identifies the problem precisely; but then refuses to name it. Instead Ms. Applebaum proceeds with the longer passage I started with. I’m reminded of the Jules Feiffer cartoon where the historian in a far flung future is presenting a lecture on American architecture, and starts with the Bauhaus school of design that, when the cartoon was published, was the current feature of new buildings. This the lecturer disparages as lacking any aesthetic virtue. He ends with a classic NYC brownstone, and marvels at the rapid improvement the culture made in just…60 years.

It’s like history’s repeating itself; or rhyming; or something. Maybe it’s because Wallace and Faubus and Buchanan never actually took the White House, and Gingrich (who started the “revolution” that let Trump into government), never let his inner David Duke out in daylight.  Maybe that truth, which Musk and Beattie and Miller and Trump are not hiding (and never really did. There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between Trump I and Trump II), is too frightening for the Beltway to contemplate. Racists, after all, are “NOK.” Which, after all, is what makes it so easy for prominent “liberal” white people to dismiss “woke” as the new “politically correct.” Racists are the overweight thugs dressed in black leather vests with no shirts. They don’t look like us. They can’t wear suits and have money and government authority.

Right?

Alternatively, Musk and Trump and Miller are not drinking from a poisoned well; they are the people poisoning the well. Always hard to fix a problem that you refuse to see clearly. But don’t take my word for it:

In fact, race is threaded through every institutional structure of this country, and we have someone who is exploiting it every day," [civil rights attirbey Sherilynn] Ifill added. "It’s not that I’m talking about race, it’s that he just stood up the other day and said, We want the Danes, the Swedes, and the Norwegians. We don’t want people from shithole countries. We’re being told that it’s illegitimate to keep talking about race when we’re confronting a tsunami of a movement that uses racism as its stalking horse."

Racism has always been the source of Trump's political power and appeal, Ifill argued, and there's no way to repair his destruction without confronting that.

I guess Trump got that idea from Truth Social?