No enemies to the right

Heritage Foundation head Kevin Roberts “is not against cancel culture in principle; he cheered Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension from ABC for his comments about Kirk’s murder. But he’s very much opposed to the cancellation of conservatives, no matter how extreme, and he’s not alone. On much of the MAGA right, attempts to impose taboos have themselves become the ultimate taboo. This stance is summed up by the phrase “no enemies to the right,” which has become common enough in MAGA world that it’s sometimes written as an acronym, NETTR.”

That’s how Michelle Goldberg sums up a prevailing Republican/right-wing attitude: the enemy is liberalism/the left and anyone who helps destroy it is welcome inside the big right-wing tent. Thus misogynist homophobic transphobic racist Matt Walsh unsurprisingly declares he will ally with anyone on the right but never with anyone on the left.

This is not news; as David Neiwert pointed out years ago, far-right anti-government types invariably grow more complacent and less anti-government when right-wingers are in charge. In a sense it’s Wilhoit’s law again: they get to cancel us, but we do not get to cancel them (Roberts: “Canceling one person today guarantees the purge of many tomorrow.”). If they cancel Nazis themselves — well, that eliminates an ally and gives the left a victory, so no.

The problem with NETTR, as Goldberg points out, is that if there’s no boundary on the right, inevitably you spiral down to a state of Nazi allyship, as Roberts and slimy Catholic right-winger Adrian Vermeule are. We end up with Moms for Liberty and others quoting Hitler, Tucker Carlson interviewing Nazi right-wing star Nick Fuentes and Heritage’s Roberts defending Carlson — though as noted at the link, the heat from his own side was hot enough to make Roberts back down. Some conservatives I normally despise, such as Lindsay Graham and Florida Rep. Randy Fine, have been outspoken against platforming Nazis (by contrast some people are content with very mild apologies).

Other Republicans? Not so much.

Is it enough? As Paul Campos says, siding with Nazis is not a great stretch for a lot of right-wingers. They can unite in their belief hierarchy is everything and that the enemy is anyone who wants it leveled to achieve equality. And that Fuentes and his followers, the groypers, are the winning side, that “the groypers control the internet, the youth, and, therefore, the future.”

And as Fred Clark points out, rejecting Fuentes while supporting the Republicans’ support of white, male, Christian supremacy is self-defeating and Fuentes’ critics on the right haven’t grasped that. “You can’t simultaneously combat Fuentes’ Nazi influence and support a “war on DEI” and the erection of monuments to Confederate generals and klansmen. You can’t share most of his agenda while resisting one part of it. So Dreher et. al. will have to make a choice and I am not yet convinced that, once they understand that, they will not continue to make the same choice they have been making up until now — the same choice that Tucker Carlson and the Heritage Foundation have made.”

Clark points out in another post that the pose so many groypers embrace, that they (in Goldberg’s words) “resent all forms of political gatekeeping,” is bullshit. Dem Graham Platner has people defending his decision to get (and keep) a Nazi tattoo but “this story would have been treated differently if Platner’s tattner had been a symbol lionizing al-Qaida or ISIS. But the meaning would not be any different, at all. That’s interesting. I suppose there’s a bit of recency bias there — it’s too soon to use al-Qaida or ISIS as a symbol of one’s manly transgressive “edginess,” but enough time has passed that the symbols of previous enemies of America can be used. But I suspect that’s not the only reason that an al-Qaida tattoo would be more widely condemned than a Nazi SS skull or a Confederate flag is.”

For that matter, would a symbol of WW II Imperial Japan or Stalinist Russia be seen as edgy like a Nazi logo, or as unAmerican? Like Clark, I know which way I’d bet.

I’ll leave with this bit from John Ganz: “Neocons love to quote Churchill and warn against the dangers of appeasement. Well, I have a Churchill quote for them: “You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor, and you will have war.”