Liminal whiteness and equality v. hierarchy

Nick Fuentes is one if not the most important ideologues on the American right wing at the moment. Just 27 years old, he has become enormously influential, especially among young people, by advocating among other things the following views:

 Christian nationalism,^[ white supremacy,^[ misogyny, anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, and antisemitism, including Holocaust denial. His supporters are known as Groypers.

Note that this isn’t a case of Fuentes’s opponents attributing these views to him: these are things that Fuentes says explicitly that he supports, which in turn is the key to his popularity and influence.

Fuentes has had at least one private dinner with Donald Trump, and with the death of his bitter enemy Charlie Kirk — both are or were Chicago-area suburbanites of roughly the same age — his ascendency in the right’s propaganda apparatus is undeniable.

Fuentes is a very common Hispanic name, and indeed Fuentes’s father is apparently half-Mexican, although anyone familiar with Mexican culture is well aware that plenty of Mexicans both identify as white and are straightforward racists, so Fuentes can easily deny that there’s any tension between his ethnic identity and his explicitly white supremacist views.

In this regard, Fuentes represents what I’ve called an “off-white” identity, but of a particular kind, which I will dub “liminal whiteness.” Liminal whiteness is the state of an off-white person who aspires to full or unambiguous or true whiteness of some sort, without having yet been granted this status by his social context. Many examples can be found among Latinos, Jews — many people in both categories “look white” as such things are evaluated in contemporary America — and, more improbably, among even very dark-skinned Indian-Americas (the original Aryans!), and other groups that one might not think were likely candidates to be accepted into the Temple of Genuine Whiteness. It should be unnecessary to say, but unfortunately it is, that categories such as “whiteness” are pure social constructions, and looking for “real” whiteness is as oxymoronic as trying to find the real objective metaphysical essence of any other thing that only exists as a social construction.

But getting back to our increasingly fashionable neo-Nazi with the Mexican name, no less an eminence than Harvard law school professor Adrian Vermeule has made it clear, or as clear as this unctuous reactionary ever makes anything, that he’s just fine allying his integralist Catholicism with Fuentes’s neo-Nazi careerism, as long as it’s necessary to do so to beat back the barbarians at the gates, aka liberals. Michelle Goldberg notes that there’s now an internet acronym for this, NETTR, that is, No Enemies To The Right.

Now on one level this kind of semi-candor on Vermeule’s part is admirable, because it reveals what in my view is the most fundamental fissure in post-1789 politics in the west, which can be described, with some necessary oversimplification, as the unending battle between those who value social hierarchy above all things, and those who champion equality, both social and economic. And in this regard it’s quite true that an integralist Catholic and neo-Nazi, or any other flavor of fascist or authoritarian, have more in common with each other than they do with any liberal democrat, or a democratic socialist, or a Marxist, or any other political ideology that is at bottom opposed to the idea that society should be fundamentally hierarchical rather than egalitarian.

[T]he chance of running across an April number of the American Nation reminded me that 1944 is also the centenary of a much better-known writer—Anatole France. When Anatole France died, twenty years ago, his reputation suffered one of those sudden slumps to which highbrow writers who have lived long enough to become popular are especially liable. In France, according to the charming French custom, vicious personal attacks were made upon him while he lay dying and when he was freshly dead. A particularly venomous one was written by Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, afterwards to become a collaborator of the Nazis. In England, also, it was discovered that Anatole France was no good. A few years later than this a young man attached to a weekly paper (I met him afterwards in Paris and found that he could not buy a tram ticket without assistance) solemnly assured me that Anatole France ‘wrote very bad French’. France was, it seemed, a vulgar, spurious and derivative writer whom everyone could now ‘see through’. Round about the same time, similar discoveries were being made about Bernard Shaw and Lytton Strachey: but curiously enough all three writers have remained very readable, while most of their detractors are forgotten.

How far the revulsion against Anatole France was genuinely literary I do not know. . . . But it is unquestionable that he was attacked partly from political motives. He may or may not have been a great writer, but he was one of the symbolic figures in the politico-literary dogfight which has been raging for a hundred years or more. The clericals and reactionaries hated him in just the same way as they hated Zola. Anatole France had championed Dreyfus, which needed considerable courage, he had debunked Joan of Arc, he had written a comic history of France; above all, he had lost no opportunity of poking fun at the Church. He was everything that the clericals and revanchistes, the people who first preached that the Boche must never be allowed to recover and afterwards sucked the blacking off Hitler’s boots, most detested.

Orwell, June 23 1944