Nationalist Fictions, in Europe and America
When people are feeling devalued or adrift, their instincts can be exploited by the powerful.
The explosive growth in right-wing populist nationalism is a nearly global phenomenon. It’s not only the MAGA movement in the United States; it’s also the nationalist regimes of Putin, Modi, and Xi, and, of course, the return of Europe’s Far Right, particularly in Italy, Hungary, The Netherlands, Germany, and France.
There are many reasons why right-wing nationalism is surging: globalization, extreme inequality, migration (and attendant changes in demographics, especially in majority-white countries), the loss of working class jobs and opportunities, changing social norms around gender and sexuality (and resistance to liberal Western values surrounding them), and many others. All of these have contributed to a perceived loss of status among groups that had previously enjoyed it, particularly (in Europe and the United States) among less-educated whites, as well as a sense of creeping disorder and loss of traditional values.
So, perhaps a billion people have responded, as they often have in the past, with an embrace of “blood and soil” nationalist identity politics that blames elites and outsiders for the decline of the nation and its values. (As I’ve written before in these pages, progressives often share this sense of looming disaster, but have very different responses to it.)
Perhaps even more important than the causes of right-wing nationalism, though, is the way it can be utilized. Ironically, populist anti-elitism can be exploited precisely by elites, who have bankrolled populist movements from German National Socialism (i.e. Nazism) in the 1930s to Trump’s campaign in 2024. In the American formulation, perhaps first pioneered by Ronald Reagan, the ultra-rich get tax breaks and deregulation, thus increasing their wealth, while the religious-nationalist base gets social conservatism and anti-immigrant actions like Muslim bans or mass deportations. Tragically, these conservative economic policies often worsen working people’s economic position, as in the cases of Brexit or the shredding of America’s social safety net and infrastructure. But as long as they are concealed by charismatic, nationalistic patriotism, the volk often supports them.
There are also important, interesting differences among nationalisms, particularly between American and European varieties. Which led to a fascinating conversation I’d like to share with you here.
My conversation partner is Joel Schalit, a leading journalist-thinker covering European fascism and nationalism, now primarily at the publication he co-founded, The Battleground. Joel is also a friend and long-ago colleague of mine (we worked together at the Jewish online magazine Zeek back in the 2000s), and we started chatting online about how right-wing nationalists have embraced J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, a subject I’ll be writing about soon. But our conversation quickly turned to the ways in which American and European nationalisms align with and diverge from one another, and by the end of it, I’d learned a lot.
So, we went back and reviewed our chat, adding more texture and examples, and here’s the result. I think you’ll find it as illuminating as I did. We started with this picture Joel sent me of a German imperial flag (left) hanging over a Tolkien-branded fascist social center in Torino, Italy:
Joel: These are Italian Génération Identitaire, a block away from us.
Jay: Fascinating. I found this great quote that maybe it’s not so surprising that fascists love books about immutable races, each living in their own separate feudal city-states.
Joel: Really well-put.
Jay: What I find odd is, these troubling parts of Tolkien resonate more with European ethnonationalism than with what JD Vance claims to stand for. Vance isn’t a white supremacist – his wife is of Indian descent – but is a ruralist nationalist, kind of a Jeffersonian. (Also, Vance is now in bed with coal, oil and other industries, the people who destroyed Appalachia like Saruman tried to destroy the Shire, but I guess that's just selling out.)
Joel: Those are crucial distinctions to make that set him part from his European counterparts. But even the head of the AfD in Germany, Alice Weidel, is queer and partnered with a South Asian woman.
Jay: That’s interesting. Multiculturalism for me but not for thee? A revival of Aryanism?
Joel: Exactly. Hindu Indians are still Aryan for certain kinds of fascists. In the Italian case, Tolkien appeals to Catholic nationalist sensibilities, since Italy is so fiercely regional. I think the American right has a habit of cribbing from Europeans crudely: what Vance is doing is similar to the appropriation of Identitarianism and Illiberalism by folks like Tucker Carlson and the Alt.Right.
Jay: It is bizarre to see nationalism at least nominally detached from race. How do you have blood and soil without the pure blood?
Joel: It's detachable because nationalism is somehow perceived as independent from race, but it ultimately leads back to it. Vance is selling provincialism as an ethnos.
Jay: IDK if you read or watched Vance's RNC speech but he made this quite explicit: that America isn't just our founding ideals but is also about being in a specific place and history. Here’s what he said:
You know, one of the things that you hear people say sometimes is that America is an idea. And to be clear, America was indeed founded on brilliant ideas, like the rule of law and religious liberty. Things written into the fabric of our Constitution and our nation. But America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.
Joel: Bingo. Minorities who buy into this are in for a rude surprise.
Jay: He even addressed the contradiction. Here’s another quote:
Now, it is part of that tradition, of course, that we welcome newcomers. But when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms. That’s the way we preserve the continuity of this project from 250 years past to hopefully 250 years in the future. And let me illustrate this with a story, if I may.
I am, of course, married to the daughter of South Asian immigrants to this country. Incredible people. People who genuinely have enriched this country in so many ways. And, of course, I’m biased, because I love my wife and her family, but I it’s true. Now when I proposed to my wife, we were in law school, and I said, ‘Honey, I come with $120,000 worth of law school debt, and a cemetery plot on a mountainside in Eastern Kentucky. . .’
Now that cemetery plot in Eastern Kentucky is near my family’s ancestral home. And like a lot of people, we came from the mountains of Appalachia into the factories of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Joel: There you go. This reminds me of German leitkultur (leading culture) ideology. It's pushed hard by both the centre and the far right in Germany to argue that minorities who do not conform to the hierarchy, as means of cultural integration, are out. He's working with a parallel concept.
Jay: What does that mean, like “You're invited here but remember ours is the primary culture and yours is not”?
Joel: Exactly.
Jay: Sounds similar to France: “Muslims are welcome here if they become French, but not if they keep wearing veils and speaking Arabic.”
Joel: Yes, the Laïcité framework for secularism, formulated at the height of French colonialism.
Jay: I'm not a conspiracy person but Putin couldn't have orchestrated this better. Just like Masha Gessen predicted, we're all living in Putinland now.
Joel: Yes, Gessen nailed it. Putin is the zeitgeist. Silvio Berlusconi’s early exaltation of Putin - and later, Trump, who copied Berlusconi, helped signify this.
Jay: The meditation-psychology person in me really wonders how correct the Steve Bannons of the world are that ethno-nationalism is just evolutionarily wired in. All primates love the in-group and hate the out-group, and most humans folks see loyalty to the nation or group as a moral value. (Jonathan Haidt wrote about that as well.) Cosmopolitans or multiculturalists like you and me are weird outliers.
Joel: Under conditions of extreme inequality, it's inevitable people react this way. Especially if they’re given nationalist narratives to do so. Since the 2008 crisis, the Euro-American far right has done its work in making this possible.
Jay: Right, it's not black & white. These tendencies may be wired in, but if the context is suitable, they get activated by people or forces who have an interest in activating them, from Hitler to Exxon.
Joel: Absolutely.
Jay: I guess we should be happy that Jews are not the new Jews. Only the real OGs still see us as the outsiders within now. Now it’s Muslims, or immigrants, or quasi-Jews like the “cultural elites.”
Joel: That’s right.
Jay: I have a question for you, which is: How populist are European far-right populisms? What I mean is, do they have economic policies that actually will help the volk, or are they total bullshit like Trumpism, which preaches populism but actually practiced plutocracy and supply-side economics. By the way, that’s even true in Project 2025 — check out this analysis of how it would increase taxes on the working and middle classes while offering even more breaks for the rich:
Joel: National populism, as we call it at
, is very real in certain EU member states: Italy, Germany, Hungary etc. But there is no egalitarian economic vision. They’re neoliberals. There’s no socialism or Keynes in their offer. The socialist pretense is often there but never adhered to. Marine Le Pen’s party indulged redistribution rhetoric the last few years only to give it up during the French elections and endorse Macron’s pension reforms.Jay: Here of course, there’s not even that pretense. The rhetoric is the opposite: opportunity, freedom, revitalize American industry, etc. Which is so sad — these voters really think the plant is gonna reopen. Trickle-down economics is the ultimate con.
Joel: Yes, its a bait and switch that leaves millions out in the cold. In Europe, the far right has always been beholden to the rich. Hitler collaborated with Krupps, for example, supplying the company with slave labour. Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Salvini always benefited from Silvio Berlusconi’s largesse and just named renamed Milano’s airport after him, as though to appease his still-powerful family. The poor are always hoodwinked by these parties.
Jay: There’s a new book out called White Rural Rage about this – like What's the Matter with Kansas? but updated for 2024 – how people in the heartland consistently vote against their economic well-being. I found the book lacking because it describes social issues as “trinkets,” i.e., just some bullshit distraction, whereas in Trump’s America, people really believe in that stuff. And in both America and Europe, demographic changes are real and it’s foolish for liberals to write off the concerns people have. These have to be engaged with, not dismissed. But on the economic side, the book is just devastating.
Joel: In Europe, the lower and middle classes are so disoriented and so hooked on the need to feel better, the plot always gets lost. If for five minutes, they feel some sort of pride, they got what they came for and don't take it further. There is a sense that they're not entitled to anything else or understand that metaphors are metaphors, not money. Self-esteem is in short supply, and demagogues are always there to exploit it. The psychology is as it reads.
If for five minutes, they feel some sort of pride, they got what they came for and don't take it further.
Jay: On the one hand I want to be more, idk, respectful of people’s non-economic beliefs. On the other hand, come on, people.
Joel: Same here.
Jay: I want to go back to Vance’s speech, which was full of anti-elite, populist rhetoric:
As always, America’s ruling class wrote the checks. Communities like mine paid the price. For decades, that divide between the few, with their power and comfort in Washington, and the rest of us only widened. From Iraq to Afghanistan, from the financial crisis to the Great Recession, from open borders to stagnating wages, the people who govern this country have failed and failed again. That is, of course, until a guy named President Donald J. Trump came along.
Joel: The far right have returned to class warfare rhetoric. This is populism 101 as the Dutch sociologist Cas Mudde explains it. It disguises the exploitative politics of the wealthy by inciting against so-called elites, as though they were revolutionaries who will solve inequality and return power to the people. As we know, such discourses are often racist and are not directed at classes, but minority communities like Jews, aka Viktor Orbán’s ‘globalists’.
Jay: It’s so infuriating, because Trump gave the largest tax break in history to the richest .1%. Reagan’s deregulation of the financial industry set the stage for the Great Recession twenty years later. Wages stagnate in large part because Republicans oppose minimum wage increases and crush organized labor. But none of these facts stick. Trump projects so much (fake) authenticity, it's hard to sell the reality. Meanwhile Vance, who worked for Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm and actually criticized the people of Appalachia as lazy, now sells himself as the original “hillbilly.”
Joel: People don't want to hear it because they have messianic needs. They feel so powerless, and Trump gets that. Hence his constituency: downwardly mobile, heavily religious.
Jay: Totally. I wrote about that in the newsletter. What’s struck me about populism is how it accurately diagnoses the pain that’s out there, but then prescribes a quack cure that obviously is not going to work. I guess, as you say, it can provide moments of pride, and that’s maybe worth something. But the plant isn’t going to reopen, whiteness isn’t going to be as dominant as it used to be, and the richest people in America will just get even richer, even faster. How many Brexits have to happen before this gets learned?
Joel: That’s a really good question, Jay. If you read recent British opinion polling, 55% of those surveyed now view Brexit as a disaster. While today’s Labour Party is nothing to write home about, the Tories got voted out and the country now has some room to reflect on what happened, and build new alternatives to neoliberalism. Let’s keep a close eye on what happens and see what can be learned from the UK, and France’s New Popular Front as well.
The victory the coalition achieved in containing Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, is worth reflecting on. You don’t have to like Jean-Luc Mélenchon to appreciate what the Front pulled off. They blocked one of Europe’s biggest fascist parties from power. Even if that’s the only thing they accomplish, it was a rare moment of inspiration we can all benefit from.
This is the first of several newsletters I’ll be devoting to the psychology (and religion) of right-wing nationalism. This question is, for me, at the heart of what Both/And is trying to do: bring together the analytical tools of political journalism (even political science) and psychology/religious/contemplative studies. I’ve been taking deep-dives into the radical elitism of Peter Thiel, the revanchist Tolkienism of his acolyte JD Vance, and related questions. I’m gratified by your support, as a subscriber, to enable me to do this work.
Over at the Forward, I did a similar bit of intersectional journalism, looking at how Trump and Biden embody very different understandings of strength, and how the entry of Kamala Harris into the race foregrounds the gendered nature of them. I also, because I couldn’t resist, wrote a progressive Jewish speech in response to Shabbos Kestenbaum’s RNC speech.
There have been some great Substack pieces this week:
- did a fantastic piece on the underreported story of Sinclair Media, which is feeding right-wing misinformation into local news around the country.
- did an excellent summary of what’s at stake for the Earth in this year’s election. Please send it to anyone on the Left who is having doubts about this.
- isn’t the only one to cover Trump’s cognitive failings, but his piece on how they were on display in his RNC speech is very, very good.
On the same subject of this week’s newsletter,
did a very good take on JD Vance’s blood-and-soil nationalism and called a spade a spade.
I hope you’re feeling encouraged and empowered by the twists and turns of the last few days. Remember, as I wrote a few weeks ago, we have no idea what is going to happen. Now let’s take that as inspiration to get to work.
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This is excellent, and I look forward to the continuation of this series. When you write "What’s struck me about populism is how it accurately diagnoses the pain that’s out there..." I'm reminded of Naomi Klein's observation in her book Doppelgänger about the Mirror World we now find ourselves in, “conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right.”
We don't talk about Steven Bannon as much these days, but as Klein lays out clearly, his fingerprints are all over this peculiarly American version of far-right populism.