After Trump, the deluge

Without Trump's charisma, the American right will have to rely on ideology. That's scary.

I can’t actually find it now, but I remember in the mid 2000s, reading some article about the rise of Islamism in Pakistan. I remember one general saying: “All the young guys have beards.” It reminded me of the fateful words attributed to King Louis XV: “Après moi, le déluge.”

I thought of that line when I read about the texts recently leaked from the Young Republicans’ group chats:

Leaders of Young Republican groups throughout the country…referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people” and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.

The leaks led to a backlash from the GOP, with the New York and Kansas chapters of the Young Republicans getting shut down, a Vermont state senator stepping down, and a handful of other participants losing their jobs. (JD Vance didn’t join in, making excuses for the “kids” in the chat group, even though they were in their late 20s or 30s).

It’s good to see that the institutions of the Republican Party still have enough power — and enough of a conscience — to crack down on things like this, at least a little bit. But it’s unlikely that official censure or condemnations will stem the trend toward authoritarianism and racial hatred among the party’s younger members. The leaked chats are not even slightly surprising for anyone who has lurked in online right-wing spaces and discussions over the past few years.

In fact, if anything, what’s surprising is that the mainstream media seems to have been so blindsided by texts that were so tame compared to what gets said on public forums like X and 4chan every day. Do people really not know that this is what young right-wingers are like now? On social media, there is a lot more unabashed Hitlerism than in the Young Republicans’ group chat. Popular right-wing accounts now regularly ridicule the widespread belief that Hitler was evil as a “religion” or a “myth”:

Even the Young Republicans in the offensive chat group talked about the trend, acknowledging that the younger people in the party are fans of the Nazis. The leaked chats’ Hitler talk was mostly in the form of jokes and sarcasm, but Politico reports that “the group chat members spoke freely about…the love of Nazis within their party’s right wing”.

In fact, attempts to rehabilitate Hitler are becoming more common all across the right-wing media ecosystem. A year ago, I wrote about Tucker Carlson’s embrace of a revisionist historian who calls Winston Churchill the true villain of World War 2, claims that Hitler actually wanted peace, and declared that Hitler conquering France was preferable to a modern drag show.

What’s going on here? I think the new trend toward Hitler apologia on the right probably represents the confluence of a few different trends.

First, the World War 2 generation has now mostly passed away. With them has gone both the eyewitness accounts of Nazi horrors, and also some portion of America’s pride in being the country that triumphed over Nazi Germany. There is no longer a large contingent of American voters and respected elders who will be personally offended and horrified if you crack a Hitler joke or engage in revisionist history about WW2.

Also, the rise of the Palestine movement on the left probably contributed to the trend. Although leftists certainly don’t like Hitler, the deep antisemitism of the Palestine movement — which tends to view Jews as presumptive Zionists unless they prove their innocence via anti-Israel activism — has effectively kicked Jews out from under the protective umbrella of progressive pro-minority activism. That gave rightists a green light to unleash their own much more virulent antisemitism without fear of leftist attack.

But most importantly, I think social media rewards extremism and punishes moderation within each party. You can see this dynamic at work in the response to the Young Republicans’ leaked texts. In the old days, when internal party debates mostly happened in private, it was possible to crack down on Nazis and other extremists. Now, thanks to social media, those debates mostly happen in public, where the opposition can see everything and potentially take advantage of any internal divisions. This makes right-wing leaders extremely reluctant to cultivate the appearance of dissension in the ranks, for fear of joining in a “left wing pile on”:

In my experience, this dynamic is similar to the one that prevailed among Democrats in 2020 and 2021. If I criticized things like “defund the police”, progressives who would almost certainly agree with me in private would demand that I not give ammunition to right-wingers and racists by publicly criticizing progressives. Any attempt to restrain the worst excesses of the extremists was seen as giving aid and comfort to the enemy. And so the worst extremists ran rampant — as they are now running rampant on the right.

Social media probably boosts extremism in other ways. Extremist sentiment tends to go viral more easily, and get more clout and attention, than moderate content. Social media apps like X expose Americans to the ideas of people outside their polity — including places like Pakistan, where Hitler is not as deeply reviled — without Americans knowing where those ideas are coming from.¹

And by boosting extremists, social media exposes everyone to maximum threat from the other side; when some random clout-chasing pseudonymous progressive calls normal Republicans “Nazis” for restricting immigration, those Republicans may feel like the whole progressive movement is calling them “Nazis”. This may make some of them simply give up on the idea of policing their actual Nazi extremists in order to maintain respectability, because they may feel that this is a lost cause.

Anyway, the upshot here is that the combination of the fading memory of WW2, the indirect influence of the Palestine movement, and the corrosive extremism of social media are allowing the worst voices on the American right to rehabilitate Adolf Hitler. That is extremely bad; Hitler richly deserves his reputation as the most terrible villain of modern history, and the truth of his rule is even more awful than the popular caricature.

Right now, the GOP and the rightist movement are dominated not by Nazi ideology, but by the personal charisma of one towering figure — Donald Trump. Some progressives may be angry at me for saying this, but for all his authoritarian impulses, Trump is not a Nazi or a Hitler figure. He’s a corrupt personalist Peronist who would love to be a dictator if he could, but he bears no allegiance to Nazi racial theories, and the policies he wants bear little resemblance to Hitler’s.

But Trump is a very old man — the oldest President we’ve ever elected, even older than Biden was at this point in his term. He’ll be 82 by the time his term finishes. Humans are mortal, and aging means cognitive decline (which is already starting) and, eventually, death. Trump will shuffle off this mortal coil, and even before he does, he will cease to be coherent or sharp enough to control the GOP or determine the direction of the MAGA movement.

There is simply no one else on the political Right whose charisma comes even close to Trump’s. If you think JD Vance is a Trump-like figure, just watch him ordering some donuts.

In the absence of a towering charismatic figure, the movement that Trump built will have to be held together by ideology. Figures like Vance or Stephen Miller won’t be able to rely on personal charisma to hold together and direct the movement that Trump bequeaths to them, so instead they’ll turn to more typical, pedestrian expedients. That will mean ideology.

Now we are starting to get an idea of what kind of ideology will be necessary to hold together the MAGA coalition. The idea of the Great Replacement — that immigration is a plot to subjugate both the White race and the Republican party — will be absolutely core to that ideology. Now we’re learning that World War 2 revisionism will be important as well. Rightists believe that Hitler’s place as the Great Satan in America’s folk memory gives liberals and leftists a moral trump card, and so they feel like they need to deemphasize the evil of the Nazis in order to level the political playing field.

Antisemitism may also be a way for the MAGA movement to retain some of its surprising levels of support from minorities without the aid of Trump’s brash charisma. Research shows that the most antisemitic demographics in the U.S. are young conservative Black and Hispanic men. Matt Yglesias read this research and summarized it thus:

The epicenter of antisemitic attitudes in the United States, in other words, is the conservative Black and Hispanic population that has often voted Democratic in the past due to identity politics but has trended toward the GOP in recent cycles. Liberal African-Americans are slightly less antisemitic than white conservatives, and Black and Hispanic conservatives are substantially more antisemitic than white conservatives.

With its immigration sweeps and urban crackdowns, MAGA is not in a great position to retain minority votes. But hating on Jews may allow them to hold on to a few foolish guys who don’t realize that Hitler would have sent them to the gas chambers too:

In other words, the MAGA movement is probably going to become more Nazi-adjacent and Nazi-apologetic when Trump’s personal influence fades. That’s obviously extremely scary, because the Nazis well deserve their reputation — it’s hard to think of a worse ideology for an American political movement to embrace. Americans who love freedom will have to fight very hard to resist this ideology.

But at the same time, the struggle against MAGA will get a lot easier when Trump is gone. It’s a lot easier to fight against an army of grim, cruel Hitler apologists than it is to battle a charismatic populist, and basically no demographic group in America is actually majority antisemitic. Things will probably get worse before they get better, but America is unlikely to stand for actual Nazism.

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1. Even if X starts identifying tweets by country of origin, likes will still be anonymous.