The Highbrow Version Of “Dems R The Real Racists”

Why “postliberals” want to imagine their enemies as racist liberals

Do you believe in racial differences? Do you think whites bear unique qualities that made their nations great? Do you have a problem with MAGIC outbreaks at your local grocery store? You might actually be a liberal, according to “postliberals.”

Postliberal is the nebulous term adopted by various think tank populists, quasi-Marxists, and integralists. They’re not like your grandfather’s conservatives: they proclaim themselves socially conservative AND economically leftist! They’re the great enemy of the liberal. And when they say liberal, they don’t mean it in the way Sean Hannity does. In fact, Hannity and the Republican Party are liberals, too! (WOW!) Postliberals seriously threaten the system, which is why they get published in the New York Times and never face harassment from the Southern Poverty Law Center. Despite relishing in their supposed edginess and boldness, postliberalism is nothing but warmed-over social democracy. The only additions are staunch opposition to abortion, criticism of “gender ideology,” and hatred for the liberal. The economic populism of postliberals is little more than posturing. The American Right, which they are part of, will never embrace social democracy. The most these postliberals can hope for is senators like Marco Rubio and Josh Hawley to talk about how much they love the multiracial working class while voting for tax cuts. The rebel wing of the GOP House Caucus fought over the House Speakership, in part, to secure votes to cut government spending and entitlement programs. That’s the antithesis of postliberal thinking.

Who is the liberal in postliberal imagination? Increasingly, it resembles the white supremacist conservative of liberal hysteria. The postliberal’s hated villain is an affluent, racist white guy; for leftists, it’s also an affluent, racist white guy. The difference is that the postliberal’s villain is a cosmopolitan “bugman,” while the liberal’s villain is a reactionary rube. They’re both hating the same thing: middle class whites. They just described this class in different terms.

Unherd presented not one, but two examples of this postliberal delusion last week. The first came from noted Greer hater Malcolm “Tinkzorg” Kyeyune. Kyeyune is a half-Swedish, half-African Marxist who somehow became a minor influence on the American Right. His article. “The Feebleness of White Nationalism” was basically an essay-length subtweet attack on yours truly. In true subtweet fashion, it took great pains to not mention my name or even link to my tweet that prompted the essay. The article was inspired by the Twitter debate over “Waffle House Wendy” and her wiggerish style. Waffle House Wendy was the white cook who brawled with black patrons in a viral video. She happens to also display some rather wiggerish traits, which I noted in a highly contested tweet. Kyeyune took this tweet as proof “white nationalists” (his term for anyone who notices race) hate the white working class and are middle class losers. (Kyeyune displays a strong animus toward the white middle class throughout the article.)

Scott Greer 6’2” IQ 187 @ScottMGreer

Tats, tongue piercing, avid weed smoker, talks in Ebonics. Valkyries sure have changed!

Dan Nguyen @dancow

Waffle House girl taking a long drag of her vape pen as she tells her side of the brawl 🫡 https://t.co/p6vNQFkw7K https://t.co/xy911kcqqy

 

The article is mostly insults directed to a smirking strawman he doesn’t bother to name. But the gist is that “white nationalists” are very much like leftists:

Ever since identity politics took over Western campuses, there has been a brisk trade in think-pieces by stodgy conservative thinkers warning of a coming (white) “backlash” that would have potentially very destructive effects for marginalised people and minorities of all kinds. Well, the backlash is actually here, and it is indeed far less threatening than people made it out to be. Expectations of campus politics generating some sort of broad-based mass movement — of ordinary whites goose-stepping in tandem through the main streets of Anytown, USA — turned out to be widely off the mark. Instead, the backlash to self-absorbed middle-class identity politics turned out to be simply another kind of self-absorbed middle-class identity politics, perpetrated by the losers of the former, while retaining more or less the exact same form and syntax. And why shouldn’t it? The true losers of mainstream identity politics and the perpetrators of this kind of politics on the prestige campuses of Western universities have much, much more in common than either side would like to admit.

Kyeyune concludes his article with bragging about how the GOP is adopting his vision of the “mulitracial working class” and leaving the racists behind. There’s no place for middle-class whites wanting to uphold traditional western civilization in this coalition. This is a bold, populist movement that dares to support weed, tattoos, and whites speaking in African American Vernacular English (previously known as Ebonics).

Kyeyune’s purpose is to associate race realism with the hated liberal foe. The working class apparently has no time for race realism. They only see class, not race. And the racists, due to their class origin, are on the enemy side. 

A more overt attempt to claim liberals are the real racists comes from columnist Sohrab Ahmari. Ahmari has made quite the name for himself. He was a anti-Trump neocon as recently as 2018. He transitioned to being a postliberal in 2019. The sudden change benefitted Ahmari’s career enormously. Once the token Perisan neocon, Ahmari is now the face of postliberalism.

His Unherd contribution to the “libs r the real racists” genre went beyond Twitter spats to indict liberalism for the creation of race. As the article’s title declares, “Race was invented by liberals.” The essay reviews Indian writer Kenan Malik’s new book Not So Black and White. The book and Ahmari argue that liberalism invented race to justify the inequalities wrought by liberalism.

[R]ace — as a dubious biological category sometimes elevated to the ontological — is distinctly modern. As he writes, “race did not give birth to racism”. Rather, “racism gave birth to race”. It was only after the Enlightenment proclaimed the basic equality of human beings that racism sprung up, as a way to justify the social realities of the post-Enlightenment world, its hierarchies and brutalities.

Malik and Ahmari differ on the response to liberal racism. Malik wants to enact an Enlightenment free of racial prejudice, Ahmari believes the answer lies in Christian universalism. But both agree race is a social construct that supports both “racial chauvinism” and progressive identity politics. 

The argument that race was invented by the Enlightenment liberals is not new, a fact Ahmari admits. Many leftists love to make this point to claim race is a recent social construct erected to support the capitalist order. Postliberals just adopt this talking point for their own purposes. 

In a sane world, neither of these essays would be treated seriously. But, sadly, we do not live in a sane world. Both of these arguments are taken seriously on the Right and find an audience ready to hear them. An unfortunately large number of folks want the New Right to just be pro-life socialism and the identity issues thrown aside. This is very different from the MAGA movement. In 2016, the Trump movement centered around identity issues. Mass immigration, anti-white racism, Black Lives Matter, crime, and political correctness were the core concerns. But addressing those issues don’t get you columns in the New York Times. What does get you that plum reward is pretending the Trumpian moment was about the multiracial working class suffering from economic anxiety. Reminder: Ahmari blamed January 6 on Trump failing to secure the interests of DoorDash drivers–in the New York Times, of course!

Postliberals are motivated primarily to claim liberals are the real racists to preserve their respectability and their delusions of edginess. They know they’ll face deplatforming if they ever entertain race realism, but they don’t want to sound like whiny journalists when denouncing it. So they claim racism is actually a sign of being a liberal bugman. This makes posliberals seem like the real right-wingers (in their minds, at least) while not threatening their career prospects. 

Genuine right-wingers should not be duped by these articles. They’re just like your uncle posting on Facebook about how the Democrats created the Klan. It’s a stupid argument that will convince no person on the fence. It’s all about signaling how the postliberal agrees with the proper views on white racism. “It’s very bad and only my political enemies would express it.” The taboo against white racism is so strong that even alleged dissidents affirm it.

A right that refuses to acknowledge race and identity issues is pointless. Postliberals adopt much of the rhetoric and ideas found in the Dissident Right, but eschew the core tenets. They may read Carl Schmitt, but they’re still liberals on the crucial issues. Fantasizing about using STATE POWER or how much you hate the Enlightenment doesn’t compensate for it. If you embrace race denialism, you are the real liberal.