The first part of this post is a short memo with advice for online American conservatives. The second is a longer historical meditation on the same theme.
Biden’s online surrogates are leaning into his image as a slightly sinister avatar of American power and global assertion. I don’t feel like trawling through DNC internet posts to show you the evidence for this, you’ve surely all seen it yourselves. The higher brow version of this is Matthew Yglesias saying that Biden is the candidate of American power and exceptionalism while Trump is a Russian (or Israeli) stooge who wants to turn America into a comparatively insignificant nation like Hungary.
This is not true. Biden and his team are not effective stewards of American power. The Afghan withdrawal made us look incompetent and cruel at the same time. While the IC raised alarms about a Russian invasion Biden quietly signaled that he expected Ukraine to collapse by pulling out American diplomatic personnel and offering an escape route to Zelensky. When the Ukrainians themselves doggedly held on, Biden reversed course and committed America to a policy of sanctions which have completely backfired by spurring the creation of an immense Eurasian trade bloc and turning Russia into an economic dependency of our far more threatening opponent, China. Russia now risks turning into more or less a captured market for Chinese manufacturers.
This leads us to China. It’s understood across the American establishment that China is the most serious threat to American security. China is the pacing threat of the National Security Strategy. What has Biden done to fit his ‘Dark Brandon’ image as a champion of American power against foreign autocracies and subversion? It was Trump who pioneered tariffs and trade strategy in the face of bipartisan derision during the 2016 campaign and when he first took office.
Woke idiocy hamstrings the Biden administration’s China policy at every turn. The CHIPs Act, which is supposed to be Biden’s signature trade strategy accomplishment, is weighed down with stupid and insulting DEI mandates. (The Hill: DEI Killed the CHIPS Act) Biden’s reversal of Trump border policies and prissy moralistic attitude towards uncontrolled border crossing and human smuggling has flooded America with illegal drugs from China via Mexico. Chinese mobsters are building vast marijuana complexes in rural Oklahoma to turn American citizens into doped-up morons (Propublica: How Chinese Organized Crime Is Dominating America’s Illegal Marijuana Market). China is pursuing an envelopment strategy of attacking American society at every level. Chinese military personnel are purchasing vast tracts of strategically important American property, and when patriotic state governments try to stop it they’re blocked by leftist Biden administration judges (CCP Landlords Matter).
These outrages add up to a very potent electoral message currently being left to rot by Trump’s online surrogates. I would wager that this is because intellectual conservative influencers have spent the past four to eight years consciously trying to disconnect themselves from American nationalism and any preoccupation with American cohesion and power. You’ll see this from both more white nationalist figures like James Kirkpatrick and mainstream Trumpists like Darren Beattie. James Kirkpatrick in particular is very invested in the idea that the country and the government no longer belong to patriotic white Americans. He will take every opportunity he can to tell white Americans that they are a stateless people, that they should not feel national pride, and that they should think of themselves as a hostile minority group under the thumb of an evil empire.
Darren Beattie coined the acronym GAE for Global/Gay American Empire. He’s very proud of this accomplishment in making white heterosexuals feel alienated from their own national power structure because of a decade-old State Department policy. Beattie will often argue that the real flag of the USA is the rainbow flag and that the real national creed is gay pride and black people worship. You can recognize the same trend in Nick Fuentes saying things like “as a dissident, the American state is my enemy. Of course I side with Russia and China! I’d fight for the Chinese!”
Even Auron Macintryre is enamored with stuff like this. This feeds into how Tucker sees himself. It all serves to give American conservatives the appearance of a treasonous fifth column while completely neutering their ability to criticize Biden for his glaring national security failures.
Probably a lot of this stems from the Iraq War. I think Gen-X conservatives were traumatized by Iraq. Now they swear they’ll never be jingoists or proponents of American assertion again. “Just leave me alone” says James Kirkpatrick. I don’t want to be made to think about global power. I want to hide underground like a hobbit. I’m sorry about George Bush and “Shock and Awe” in Baghdad.
Trump, of course, knows better than this and presented the really effective argument for right wing critics of leftism in government. The Iraq War wasn’t bad because it was a GAE plot, it was bad because it was stupid. “The Iraq War was a big fat mistake.” We shouldn’t cooperate with Russia because of a nebulous social conservatism and crunchy con isolationism but because we share strategic priorities like stabilizing the Middle East and, hopefully, not turning Russia into a Chinese colony. Finally, on China, we need to fight back, take back our industry, and break down their industry as much as possible. This argument is still just as potent now as it was when first articulated by Trump.
If you think someone is trying to finagle you into a war then it is important to take a hard line for a time against military romanticism. When a war has already occurred, especially one in which your ancestors fought, then it’s good to take stock and admit that there may have been good mixed with bad.
The American experience of the Second World War encompassed things both good and bad. It was an event of epic proportions. It was an occasion for American men to earn glory and renown and do the kinds of incredible things that only happen during a global conflict.
George Patton lived a magnificent life. I feel about Patton the same way BAP feels about Lacaedamonian tyrants. In the life of someone like Patton you find all the promise of the early twentieth century as a Greco-Roman renaissance (I strongly recommend the Carlo d’Este biography). Patton was a freak of nature. He was a lonely man. He could accept nothing less than excellence and he lived a glorious life under the auspices of the American Century. He stabled his polo ponies under Hawaiian volcanoes. He trained as a master fencer in France and competed in the Olympics. At successively larger scales he honed groups of soldiers into disciplined Mannurbundeae which he used to write his name in history. WWII was his war.