The New Right by Michael Malice

Author:Michael Malice
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

9

GET IN THE CHOPPER

Sometimes democracy must be bathed in blood.

—AUGUSTO PINOCHET

Despite media attempts to conflate the New Right with Trump support, the two are not identical phenomena. It is certainly true that the New Right was pretty much unanimously pro-Trump or at the very least anti-anti-Trump. Since members of the New Right view politics as a consequence of the battle to be had but not precisely the field upon which it is to be fought, the presidency is only one element of the bigger picture. The person in the White House is nowhere near as important for someone in the New Right as for a progressive or a conservative. The movement preceded Trump’s candidacy and would have continued had he been defeated in the 2016 presidential election.

As far as I could tell, there wasn’t a single person prominent in the movement who didn’t have very strong reservations about Donald Trump. This is due to several reasons, not even counting Trump’s erratic behavior. There’s the question of whether any one president can do enough to save the country, both due to how antagonistic U.S. culture has become and how resistant our political system is to change. There’s also the tacit understanding that people in Washington know how the system works far better than Trump could ever hope to and would be able to undermine him at every turn. Trump and his online followers might be better at social media than the clunky corporate press, but he and his team would not be able to out-Washington Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan.

So if there’s someone who the New Right admires almost without hesitation or qualification, it’s not Donald Trump. It’s not even an American—it’s Nigel Farage, former head of the UK Independence Party (UKIP). Before Farage came along, British anti-EU sentiment was strongly tinged with racism and even white supremacism. Groups like the British National Party were brazenly based on racial identity, and Farage mentor Enoch Powell’s famous “Rivers of Blood” speech has been viewed as racist code by progressives and white nationalists alike.

In 1993 Farage was one of the founders of UKIP, formed in reaction to Prime Minister John Major’s increasingly pro-EU actions—a far cry from his predecessor Margaret Thatcher’s heavy skepticism of the European Union and its consequent threat to British sovereignty and the integrity of the pound. Farage was first elected to the European parliament, and there, so to speak, a star was born.

Part of the reason Farage is so beloved by the New Right isn’t simply his views but his approach. His speeches to the European Parliament are some of the few examples of politicians being treated to their face with irreverence if not downright contempt—something that has increasingly been happening since then thanks to social media.

“You have the charisma of a damp rag, and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk,” he told then-EU president Herman Van Rompuy in 2010. “You appear to have a loathing for the very concept of the existence of nation-states—perhaps that’s because you come from Belgium, which of course is pretty much a non-country.

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