The term was born among Hawaiian surfers: Howell was the foreign surfer, the invader of my beach. In democratic politics, what matters are values and programs: the destination of the journey. In identity politics, on the contrary, what matters is the distant origin of the individual: his “blood,” “lineage,” or “race,” not where he goes.
Lineage, that’s the word. J.D. Vance suggests that “true Americans” are those whose ancestors were in the United States during the Civil War. Nationalism is a common feature of right-wing and left-wing identity.
Viktor Orbán continues his xenophobia based on the myth of the “Great Replacement”: the supposed conspiracy of “globalists” to flood Europe with immigrants. The Jewish left promotes the idea of one state in Palestine by describing Israel as a European colonial implant aimed at eradicating the “indigenous people.”
National, but not only. Right-wing identity is distinguished from its left-wing version by a second founding element: Christianity. In the USA, the MAGA bible, the Trump movement, is the New Testament, not the Constitution. Conservative Supreme Court justices are guided by originalism, that is, by the literal meaning of the constitutional text at the time it was written. How will they fare in crucial prosecutions of the White House’s systematic violations of the law?
Christianity, in this case, is not the general obligation expressed by baptism, but the idea that social life should be governed by the “law of God.” Michelle Bolsonaro expresses this reactionary goal in Brazilian politics: Hawley are the “deviants” regarding sexual orientation, the issue of abortion or the status of women and the family.
Fundamentalist Christian drift brings back classic anti-Semitism. The Heritage Foundation is pressing Trump to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Pat Buchanan, an isolationist Republican and notorious anti-Semite who blames Churchill, not Hitler, for World War II. Tucker Carlson, a MAGA evangelist, spoke at Charlie Kirk’s funeral and likened him to the Messiah, “who fell victim to a bunch of guys eating chickpeas,” an unintelligible reference to Jews.
The “stateless,” “globalist,” or “imperialist” Jews are the iconic Jews. On the right, the source of anti-Semitism is the accusation that the Jews killed Christ. On the left, the conspiratorial narrative linking Jews to global finance. The two sides meet in the thesis according to which Jews exercise hegemonic power in the United States through control of the “deep state.”
Identity politics tends towards entropy. On the left: the struggle between feminists and trans activists over the definition of female sexuality or the challenge of “coloureds,” “real blacks,” to official Brazilian racism that distributes quotas to “half-whites.” Right: The extremism of nationalism toward the production of “local homelands.” The mayor of Florianópolis deports poor immigrants at the bus station. The Governor of Santa Catarina supports the invention of internal borders and is practicing the creation of a symbolic “state passport”, while Bolsonaro’s deputies from the state protest against the prior nomination of Holly Carlos Bolsonaro.
Howells takes care. Hunting season reaches its peak.
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