No surprise here, an excellent analysis …
‘Trump’s presidency is a symptom of our time’
12 Oktober 2017 – 09:10
Twitter rants, alternative facts, fake news: president Donald J. Trump is truly something new. But according to culture scientist Ico Maly, the ideology that drives the Trump administration is not new, not exclusively American, and not going away. Is the New Right the new normal?
The election of Donald Trump as president of the United States has shocked the world. Nobody saw it coming. Not the media, not the pollsters, not the political analysts, and not the Tilburg University students following the New Media and Politics class taught by Belgian culture scientist Ico Maly. “In the months leading up to the presidential election, I told my students that there was a real chance Trump would win the White House. They laughed and said there was no way that would happen”, Maly says.
More below the fold …
It happened. Trump’s presidency, his tweets, alternative facts, fake news, white supremacy, misogyny, the `alt-right’, Charlottesville: it took us all by surprise, Maly says, despite being perfectly predictable. “What is happening in the US is not exceptional. Of course Trump’s idiosyncratic style is, but the phenomenon as such is an expression of a global phenomenon, a trend that has been building momentum since the fall of the Berlin wall”, he explains. “After the Iron Curtain was drawn back in 1989, the complete restructuring of the global economy led to profound inequality. In a crippling globalized economy, we see new far-right movements capitalize on two fundamental ideas: regaining national control, and putting a stop to immigration.”
Ico Maly wrote his dissertation on the ideology of the New Flemish Alliance, or the N-VA, a nationalist political party in Belgium. Intimately familiar with the nationalist narrative of the N-VA, Maly did not look at Trump’s electoral success with the same astonishment that most of us felt. “I know this story”, he explains. “The N-VA tells a very similar one. It’s a story that resonates with our times, a story that resonates with certain groups today.”
Just to be clear, no reference to anti-Putinism or the Russian alt-right as American politics so easily propagate.
For the first time I read the thoughts of Ico Maly, heard him today in a radio broadcast interview in Holland. He gave the same warning I have written about for a number of years about the populist Geert Wilders and his anti-immigration party, pro-Israel and preaching Islamophobia. A modern version of Wilders is Thierry Baudet … a rising star in the Dutch polls. A new normal due to lack of wise opposition. See the carmeleon politics of Dutch PM Mark Rutte.
New Right – generations in an attempt to reverse the Age of Enlightenment …
The French Origins of “You Will Not Replace Us” | The New Yorker – Dec. 2017 |
Camus has spent most of his career as a critic, novelist, diarist, and travel essayist. The only one of his hundred or so books to be translated into English, “Tricks” (1979), announces itself as “a sexual odyssey–man-to-man,” and includes a foreword by Roland Barthes. The book describes polyglot assignations from Milan to the Bronx. Allen Ginsberg said of it, “Camus’s world is completely that of a new urban homosexual; at ease in half a dozen countries.”
In recent years, though, Camus’s name has been associated less with erotica than with a single poignant phrase, le grand remplacement. In 2012, he made this the title of an alarmist book. Native “white” Europeans, he argues, are being reverse-colonized by black and brown immigrants, who are flooding the Continent in what amounts to an extinction-level event. “The great replacement is very simple,” he has said. “You have one people, and in the space of a generation you have a different people.” The specific identity of the replacement population, he suggests, is of less importance than the act of replacement itself. “Individuals, yes, can join a people, integrate with it, assimilate to it,” he writes in the book. “But peoples, civilizations, religions–and especially when these religions are themselves civilizations, types of society, almost States–cannot and cannot even want to . . . blend into other peoples, other civilizations.”
Camus believes that all Western countries are faced with varying degrees of “ethnic and civilizational substitution.” He points to the increasing prevalence of Spanish, and other foreign languages, in the United States as evidence of the same phenomenon. Although his arguments are scarcely available in translation, they have been picked up by right-wing and white-nationalist circles throughout the English-speaking world. In July, Lauren Southern, the Canadian alt-right Internet personality, posted, on YouTube, a video titled “The Great Replacement”; it has received more than a quarter of a million views.
