The New Right’s Grim, Increasingly Popular Fantasies of an International Nationalism – The New Republic

The primary example of this shift was a November article in The American Conservative, co-written by Pecknold, Ahmari, and Pappin. The piece, In Defense of Cultural Christianity, began with four scenarios: a cohabitating Matteo Salvini, the former deputy prime minister of Italy, waving rosary beads at a political rally; a divorced Marian Marchal Le Pen, the former French politician, declaring Christianity the bedrock of French identity; a biblically illiterate Donald Trump brandishing a Bible during a photo op condemning anti-racism protests; and Orbn using public money to restore churches in an overwhelmingly secular country. The punch line was that none of these seeming examples of hypocrisy was problematic but, rather, they were commendable instances of a culturally Christian order that didnt guarantee the salvation of every soul, but laid down structures that made such a thing easier. The four leaders might be bad Christians, but their embrace of Christian symbolismthe fumes of religiosity, as another NatCon speaker put itcould go further toward establishing the culture integralists want than purity alone. After all, if woke ideology had been able to conquer the public square despite the fact that its true-believing adherents form a minuscule share of the population, cultural Christianity might be able to do the same, and thus save the countries that embrace it.

To Hazony, the argument demonstrated an exciting graduation to pragmatism, similar to his own conference proposalwhich he, too, repeated at Hungarys Mathias Corvinus Collegium this fall. The American Conservative article called not for the total conversion of the public but rather a brokered agreement that Christianity should dominate the public square, even in places where the population is far from devout. It also renewed the vows between nationalism and traditional religion, since all four examples of cultural Christians the authors chose were clear nationalists, as well. Here were the building blocks of a new conservative fusionism.

In historical terms, this is the way the conservative movement has operated since the 1940s and 50s, said Jerome Copulsky, a research fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. You had these different wings of the conservative movement, like the Catholic traditionalists, the Southern agrarians, the libertarians, the Cold Warriors, but youre facing this liberal beast. So you find the Venn diagram where you all have a shared space and go forward on that. Many of todays right-wing marriages of convenience negotiate similar truces between its jockeying factions: from minor discrepancies, like the fact that Deneen and Ahmari dont call themselves integralists, to larger questions about how to square Catholicisms claims of universality with nationalism.

While no serious Catholic can take an uncomplicatedly nationalist stance, Ahmari told me, he supported the new nationalism in a narrow, tactical way. Nationalism was good insofar as it stands against the utopian ideal of a borderless world that, in practice, leads to universal tyranny, atomizing people into self-maximizing consumergig workers and threatening traditional belief. Nationalism could check those abuses, and cultural Christianity could help. The whole point is that cultural Christianity is this vestigial structure that cant be stamped out, he explained. As liberalism falters, that structure could help reconnect Western nations to their deepest roots and prompt moral renewal, even and especially among populations that arent possessed of a profound and spiritual faith.

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The New Right's Grim, Increasingly Popular Fantasies of an International Nationalism - The New Republic