An Autumn Night In Westminster
And: Nick Cave, Missionary Of Grief
Now that was a fine London evening! Last night at the UnHerd Club, Freddie Sayers interviewed me before an audience, talking about the Situation in the US, with the Right, Nick Fuentes, and all that. Lo, who should come to the event but the musician Nick Cave! We ended up having dinner after the event. Tell you about it in a second.
But first, the event itself. The British are really interested in this cock-up (as they say) on the American Right. The room was full of smart, interested people, one-third of whom (according to Freddie’s raise-your-hand poll at the end) thought I was making too big a deal of the Groyper threat, two-thirds of whom agreed that the concern is warranted, and two of whom identified as Groypers! Two UK Groypers — imagine that. I’m glad they came, anyway. Found out that Tucker Carlson was in London last night. Had he gate-crashed, boy, that would have been a spicy night!
I met a Christian friend in London for a pint a few hours before the event. He told me that his American in-laws are normie Boomer conservative Christians who had no idea who Nick Fuentes was, until he appeared on Tucker Carlson’s softball interview. They are big fans of Tucker, and came away from that interview convinced that this Fuentes boy makes a lot of sense. My friend had to try to convince them otherwise. See, this is why Tucker’s normalization of Fuentes through that mushy interview is so dangerous. Had Tucker done a proper interview, it might have been otherwise, but he didn’t, so here we are. Lots and lots of normal conservatives trust Tucker, who was great on Fox. This is why what has happened to him is so tragic — and so potentially dangerous.
Here is a clip of Tucker on Shawn Ryan’s show defending his having Fuentes on. He says that he hates anti-Semitism and racism. Said he asked around about Nick Fuentes beforehand, and found that Fuentes is a super-popular influencer among young white men. He said he began by hating Fuentes because Fuentes attacked his late father. But later, he decided to have Fuentes on to ask him about his beliefs. Sorry, but this is disingenuous. TC says he doesn’t like to “lecture” people, bur rather just give people a chance to say what they believe.
Give me a break! One of the reasons TC was such a great figure on Fox was that he would give great monologues “lecturing” his audience about the news of the day — and he would do combative, excellent interviews. Anyway, TC tells Shawn Ryan that “nobody has attempted to rebut” Fuentes’s analysis, aside from criticizing him for his racism.
Oh, come on! I have said over and over that Fuentes comes from somewhere — precisely, that his grievances about the economic and cultural plight of white males is rooted in reality. But you know, Hitler arose from legitimate grievances of many Germans, but you cannot separate what was legitimate in Hitler’s program from the fact that he absolutely hated Jews and other non-Aryans.
TC says he hates “identity politics” — but that’s at the core of Fuentes’s thought! And he also claims that people are so mad at him for having Fuentes on specifically because he hates anti-Semitism. Uh, no, man, it’s because you are one of the biggest influencers among right-wing normies, and you gave this Fuentes guy a tongue bath, and not the combative treatment you give to other guests.)
Anyway, readers of this newsletter will know what my basic argument last night was. I focused on the warnings given by both Hannah Arendt and Matthias Desmet about the social and cultural conditions that give rise to totalitarianism, and how we in both the US and all across the West are smack in the middle of them now — especially with mass social atomization and the meaning crisis that has overtaken Generation Z.
You all know Arendt’s model, I suppose. To recap Desmet’s argument, he says that “mass formation” can occur in a society that suffers from widespread loneliness and social atomization. It is a society suffering from a meaning crisis, and one in which large numbers of people live with high levels of general anxiety, as well as frustration.
Sound like any society you know?
When this happens, says Desmet, people become vulnerable to a simple explanation for their fear and anxiety — the Jews, immigrants, et alia. They demand a simple strategy to deal with what they perceive as a problem. About 30 percent of the people in such a society become fanatically committed to the Narrative, and cannot be reasoned with, because the psychological comfort that comes with having a Narrative, and finding solidarity with others who share the Narrative, is more important to them than reason.
Another 40 to 50 percent may not accept the Narrative, but go along with it because it’s easier than confronting it, or they prefer not to get involved. The remaining people who dissent then become targets for the totalitarian believers.
Desmet says that the only real solution in such a case is to keep speaking the truth, no matter the cost. You aren’t going to get through to the hardcore believers, but the greater number of uncommitted might be persuaded so see reason. Arendt held the German middle class chiefly responsible for Hitler, because they didn’t really believe Nazism was a solution, but were too complacent about its threat until it was too late.
This is why I speak out against Groyperism and its various iterations.
A point I made last night, and make here, is that the people who fall for Fuentes’s line are by no means entirely wrong about the crisis. Zoomers really do face critical problems, both materially (e.g., not being able to afford housing), socially (not being able to find a stable partner; disconnection from social bonds), and morally/religiously (no religion or belief in transcendence). And many of those problems do have political causes. Mass migration, especially in the UK, has driven up housing costs for obvious reasons. The shortage of meaningful work (versus the gig economy) creates an anxious and angry precariat (precarious proletariat).
An older woman in the audience last night suggested that if we just found a way to get good jobs for these young people, the Groyper threat would disappear. I responded by saying it is certainly true that if we don’t give young people a stake in society, we can’t expect them to be loyal to it. That said, if every one of the Zoomers were given good jobs tomorrow, that would do nothing about the loneliness epidemic, or the meaning crisis. These are grave challenges that cannot be solved through politics.
Incidentally, I learned yesterday, reading Harald Jähner’s history of the Weimar Republic, that in 1920s Germany, relations between men and women were highly fraught.
In the early years of the twentieth century, could there have anything more drastic than the pitched battles of the First World War? Yes, in fact – the change in the status of women.
That at least was the view of Stefan Zweig, one of the best-known authors of his time. Zweig was quite certain that ‘a future cultural history of this complete revaluation and transformation of European women’ would ultimately be more disruptive than the war. He was convinced that women had radically changed, and the rest of the country with them, and that this shift ran deeper than all the changes in architecture, traffic, technology or even politics. Not only had women’s appearance undergone a radical change between 1905 and 1925, their behaviour, their speech and their thought had changed as well.
And what about men? They seemed to have stayed more or less the same; at least that was how it seemed to men themselves, since most of them, pragmatic by nature and habit, thought comparatively little about themselves. However, many men shared the feeling of standing on the edge of a great upheaval, with women at its centre. According to their characters and political viewpoints, they viewed the emancipation of women with concern, anxiety, pity, acquiescence, joy or loathing.
If you know anything about Weimar Germany, you probably are aware that Berlin, at least, was a world center of sexual decadence and excess. Transgenderism was a big deal there, in the clubs and in the influential thought of the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who pushed hard against every boundary there was. It remains an unfortunate truth for we who despise anti-Semitism that Hirschfeld was Jewish. Then as now, some of the leaders in so-called “liberationist” movements that tore down traditional moral boundaries were Jewish. But as Jähner points out, conservative Jews in Weimar Germany were just as opposed to these things as conservative Gentiles.
My interlocutor Freddie Sayers, who is a classical liberal, focused some of his questioning on whether or not “postliberals” like me bear responsibility for the rise of the Groypers. His idea is that by criticizing classical liberalism for its failures, we paved the way for those like Fuentes who want to tear it all down. I pushed back on this, arguing that it does no good to pretend that liberalism hasn’t failed in serious ways — chiefly by dissolving, through economic policy and moral revolutions, the traditional social bonds that make for a cohesive society.
The problem, though, is that no one has a satisfying answer for what comes next. But it is fallacious to say that because one has no clear solution, that the problem doesn’t exist. Remember, Patrick Deneen’s core argument in his landmark book Why Liberalism Failed is that liberalism failed because it succeeded brilliantly in its chief goal: to liberate the individual from any unchosen obligations. The reason why I am such a lousy postliberal is that I can’t conceive of a replacement for liberalism that would work in such a radically diverse society as America.
Do you want to live in a country desired by “Christian Nationalists” like Stephen Wolfe, Andrew Isker, and that tribe? Not me, never. Would Catholic integralism appeal to you? It wouldn’t to me, as a non-Catholic, but even if it did, it would be completely impossible in a country like America, where Catholics are a minority, and even among Catholics, only a vanishingly small number of them would be willing to submit to an integralist state.
Yet something is coming to replace tottering liberalism. I pointed out last night that in the UK and Europe, the failing liberal parties and institutions keep trying to keep themselves aright by suppressing critics, and monstering their criticism as racist, fascist, “hate speech,” and so forth. Hence Groyperism. That said, though I oppose “hate speech” laws, every society must maintain at least some social taboos against certain kinds of speech. Every society does, in fact. The question, though, is: where do we draw the line? And how do we enforce that line?
It was a good discussion, and will be available online soon. I’ll post the video here.
By the way, some anti-Groypers have taken comfort in the fact that X’s new policy on identifying the geographical source of particular X accounts revealed that more than a few pro-Groyper accounts are not American, but based in places like Pakistan. The idea is that Groypers don’t really have popularity, that this is an astroturfed phenomenon. It is certainly a comfort to learn that there aren’t as many authentic Groypers on X as we thought, but not much of one. Why not? Because only 20 to 30 percent of Zoomers active on social media use X. They prefer YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, and other social media forms.
After the event, I joined Freddie’s table downstairs in the restaurant. James and Helen Orr were there, with their son Godfrey, and so was Nick Cave, whose existence I first became aware of in the 1980s when I saw him and his band, the Bad Seeds, play in the Wim Wenders film Wings Of Desire:
After suffering the death of his teenage son Arthur a decade ago, Nick began to look for meaning, and is now a parishioner at St. Bartholomew’s church in London. Let’s talk about Nick below the paywall. Sorry to restrict it just to subscribers, but I need to give them something special for their patronage. And trust me, this is beyond special. For me, I will look back on having met him, and discovered his music and thought, as a turning point in my life. Read on…
