Intellectuals and Populism
Daylight between the lumpen and intellectual factions of the Resistance is fading fast
Jen Rubin, late of the Washington Post and now lurking on Substack, was as I thought the exemplar, the distillation, the essence, of Resistance hysteria, in her person concentrating all of the bile, doublethink, and sheer lunacy characteristic of Genus Resistance. But since November 5, 2024, and particularly since January 20, 2025, the rest of the gang has been gaining ground on her. It’s been a bit disheartening to see serious people, people whom I respect, edge their way in the direction of the Resistance fever swamps.
Admittedly, the election of Donald Trump and his return to the Oval Office has been a soul-crushing experience, not only for the broad Left but for people of moderate views who have never been able to stomach the Prince of the Golden Escalator. And though I admit to taking pleasure in the well-earned discomfiture of the comrades, I take none in the spread of the never-Trump mind virus.
For the Left, of course, Trump’s comeback has negated its priors and confounded its core assumptions. The postmodern progressive project now lies in pieces on the floor; the fraudulence of the ideas represented by such acronyms as DEI and BIPOC has been exposed. Shallow and frivolous those ideas may have been, but many people believed in them. But though their present emotional distress is understandable, their refusal to face reality is inexcusable. Will these fanatics never move on? Here, for example, is Ms. Rubin, bloviating about Inauguration Day 2025:
The American people certainly will not be front and center at Trump’s inauguration. It’s all about him and his billionaire cronies, including the media owners who have buckled to his will. “Big-name billionaires are lining up to strengthen their relationships with incoming President Donald Trump during next week's inauguration festivities, as top dogs like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and more are expected to turn up in Washington, D.C.,” Forbes reported. When you add in TikTok CEO Shou Chew, Mark Zuckerberg, and Apple’s Tim Cook—whose combined wealth dwarfs many countries’ GDP’s—you get a vivid tableau of the new oligarchy. We usher into office today a government of, by, and for the billionaires.
I chose this particular passage, first because it harps upon a string now being plucked by many fingers—the “new oligarchy”—and second because of its characteristic deafness to irony. During the 2023-24 election cycle, the Biden-then-Harris campaign hoovered up far more dark money from corporate oligarch sources than did the Trump campaign: around $1.5 billion. (How well that money was spent is questionable, to put it no more bluntly.) Nor during the presidency of Joe Biden was there any discernable handwringing over the emerging technocratic oligarchy. On the contrary, Biden & Co. enlisted many of these sinister tech oligarchs in the fight against “disinformation,” i.e. anything that questioned or contradicted officially approved narratives.
But those awkward facts have been consigned to the memory hole, and the threat of the new oligarchy is now the Left’s officially approved narrative, the latest iteration of its demonology. And save for the Ogre Trump, the chief demon is Elon Musk. The comrades have long been reviling Trump as a Nazi, a fascist, the American Hitler. Now they’ve nominated Musk for the position of the dictator’s eminence grise: his Joseph Goebbels perhaps, or his Martin Bormann. And the proof? Why, it’s the fact that Muck recently gave the Hitler salute—in public!
The supporting evidence for this charge: that Musk is a white man of South African origin, therefore a racist, and that he’s come out as a supporter of Donald Trump. Absent from the Left’s indictment, however, is any solid evidence of Musk’s fascist sympathies or involvement with white supremacist groups, Neo-Nazi political parties, etc.
True, Musk has expressed his support for Germany’s right-wing populist party, Alternative für Deutschland. AfD is Euroskeptic in outlook and opposed to immigration, especially Muslim immigration. In the German media, the party is routinely described as “far right,” though its positions on the issues stop far short of National Socialism. But polls show AfD to be the second or third most popular party in Germany. And it’s not exactly out there in the fringe: Recent events in both Europe and America have shown that opposition to uncontrolled immigration and porous borders is the mainstream position. If AfD is far right, what was National Socialism? The ultra-far right?
The alacrity with which Resistance warriors took up the cries of “Oligarchy!” and “Musk the Nazi” was really a wonder to behold. No sooner had Joe Biden mumbled this way through a warning about the former in his farewell speech to the nation than the meme was all over the place. It was a telling demonstration of the herd mentality of the Left. Musk’s demonization was equally swift. As has been demonstrated many times, progressive politics depends on signs, symbols, and demon words. Thus Elon Musk, in all his genius awkwardness, has been adopted as the fascist symbol of the Oligarchy.
If this ridiculous meltdown were limited to the lumpen-Left, I’d be less concerned about it. The online Resistance does not, shall we say, channel the eloquence of Pericles. Here’s an example from Substack:
No you're just a fucking idiot. That was a Nazi salute. That's who you voted for. It shouldn't be surprising given that Trump said white supremacist and Nazis were good people during the Charlottesville rally. It's not surprising that Nazis in white supremacist support Trump and thank Trump supports them. (This from someone who styles himself “The Atheist Dude,” in response to my Note doubting whether anybody really believes that Musk gave the Hitler salute.)
No worries there: The Atheist Dude is simply a jerk—or if you will, a crazy person shouting at clouds. But there are many other people with impressive resumes who’ve followed him down the Resistance rabbit hole, for instance Anne Applebaum.
Ms. Applebaum is a serious person, conversant with history, the author of many books, including Gulag: A History and Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine—both of which I strongly recommend to anyone with an interest in the history of the late, unlamented USSR. But over the last decade she has evolved into an alarmist, a Cassandra, who believes that the emergence of populism in America and Europe foreshadows a new authoritarian age. Hers is not a frivolous argument as regards Eastern Europe, where democracy has shallow roots. But it seems to me less valid farther to the West in Europe, and much less valid regarding the United States of America.
Why it is that I disagree with Ms. Applebaum on the severity of the threat posed by the American populist tribune, Donald Trump, is a subject best reserved for another article. Here let it suffice to say that the United States is too large, too diverse, too decentralized, and too democratic to support the emergence of an authoritarian strongman. Nor does American history include an era of authoritarianism. Here in the land of E Pluribus Unum, we have no such tradition. Though it’s true that both American progressivism and American populism have certain authoritarian tendencies, the system corrects for them. One might say, indeed, that Trump’s ascendency corrects—perhaps overcorrects—for the authoritarian vices of progressivism.
For these reasons, what might very well happen in Bulgaria or Poland is unlikely ever to happen in America.
But intellectuals—broadly speaking, people whose careers are concerned with the manipulation of ideas and language—are especially susceptible to theories of everything. Anne Applebaum has constructed an elaborate theory of reemergent authoritarianism, not lacking in intellectual rigor, but overly broad in scope. Just as there was not one fascism but a variety of fascisms, there are varieties of democracy, some far more vulnerable than others to the threat of authoritarian populism. Nor is populism itself a monolithic political force.
The rise of populism across the West has multiple causes, but prominent among them is the failure of establishment politics. In one way and another, traditional political elites have squandered their credibility—by losing touch with the people they govern, by the substitution their preferences for the will of the people, by scorning democratic accountability, by sheer incompetence. Alternative für Deutschland is a factor in German politics because in 2015, former Chancellor Angela Merkel threw open the country’s borders to hundreds of thousands of “migrants,” from Syria and elsewhere. Her response to strong popular opposition to that policy: a dismissive Wir schaffen das (We can do this.) As things turned out, the German people did not agree.
From this, of course, progressives in the United States drew no lesson. When Joe Biden was sworn in as president in January 2021, among his first actions was to throw open the country’s southern border to a tsunami of “migrants.” Having ejected Trump from office in the 2020 election, the Democratic political establishment, all unwittingly, set about laying the groundwork for the the political comeback of Donald J. Trump.
Intellectually and morally, Jen Rubin and Anne Applebaum are worlds apart. The former is a lunatic dwelling in some alternate universe; the latter, I believe, is a thoughtful person with good intentions. That they ended up on the same side of the political divide can only be characterized as a tragedy.
Why do the people who see illusory Hitlers everywhere never see the real Stalins setting up shop in their midst?
I agree that Applebaum's derangement is a tragedy -one of her books was the first one I ever downloaded- but her more recent rants eclipse her earlier intellectual acuity, and her penchant for petty backstabbing bespeaks a moral collapse as well.
This isn’t an argument, but a request for your opinion. You say, “… the United States is too large, too diverse, too decentralized, and too democratic to support the emergence of an authoritarian strongman.” Your lips to God’s ear. But the Iron law of Oligarchy (Robert Michels) says that “in a large, complex society, representative democracy will always bend toward control by a few powerful people.” (quote from WSJ article). What is the reality of how to govern a large, diverse, divided country, half of whose citizens pay no taxes, and whose Congress cannot even pass a budget?