Red-brown alliances are just brown

The “if drag queens can tell stories in public, democracy must be ended” dude and a couple of other cranks have assembled a true murder’s row of the worst pundits defined by their belief that fascism is preferable to liberalism:

As the fact that the nominal “left” people on this list now say almost exclusively right-wing things to increasingly right-wing audiences indicates, this isn’t a genuinely cross-ideological alliance, because anti-liberal alliances with the right quickly lose any left content:

Compact magazine, which launched on Tuesday, boasts grand designs. “Our editorial choices are shaped by our desire for a strong social-democratic state that defends community — local and national, familial and religious — against a libertine left and a libertarian right,” it declares on its website. Yet there’s Glenn Greenwald, a libertarian gay man, and Slavoj Žižek, who’s difficult to categorize as anything but an elevated troll, on the masthead, along with Adrian Vermeuele, a Catholic integralist. What interests do they share with Vermeule, a legal scholar who’d put the world under a theocratic yoke and call it liberty?

The question matters because Compact is a symptom of something larger than the magazine itself. There is a rich business to be done in subversion or the imitation thereof. Greenwald is an expert purveyor of this pseudo-contrarianism, having fashioned himself a victim of the liberal media. Grievance is what he shares with Compact’s other contributors: a sense of being shut out from a world that should welcome him. For all Compact’s pretensions to the contrary, there’s nothing novel about this contemporary contrarianism. It’s just reactionary to the core.

This is at odds with Compact’s self-advertisement. A light piece in the New York Times makes much of the founding trio’s eclectic views. Sohrab Ahmari and Matthew Schmitz are both undeniably of the right, and the far right at that. Yet they’re joined by Edwin Aponte, who calls himself a Marxist. Such red-brown alliances have their history; again, Compact breaks no new ground. The right usually dominates, as it does here.

For proof, there’s content. Compact’s inaugural articles tilt mostly to the right. One article by Nina Power claims that the patriarchy has been dismantled, leaving terrible violence in its place. Another, by Adam Lehrer, urges heterosexual male artists to resist “aesthetic castration” in the age of Me Too. An Aponte article on free speech suggests that conservatives are “out of power” today, though “tomorrow, the same people may be in power and leading the charge in favor of a ban against transgenderism in schools.” This is a collection of fantasies. Conservatives do not control the White House, but elsewhere, they are leading a charge to eliminate any mention of LGBT people from schools. Male desire does not face repression; it’s as popular as Dave Portnoy. As for the patriarchy, its power is palpable. The wage gap, the absence of paid family leave, the prominence and power of the nation’s Brett Kavanaughs, are legacies of patriarchy and won’t be solved by some magical perfected version of the same.

Even if some of these individuals favor some social democratic programs — and I wouldn’t bet on that commitment being much more than marketing guff — it’s a moot point. On the one hand, the only viable reactionary movement in the United States will never support them. The Trump administration’s idea of social welfare policy was upper-class tax cuts and taking healthcare away from tens of millions of people to pay for even more upper-class tax cuts; it made Amhari an even more fanatical Republican than he was before because at best he doesn’t give a shit. And on the other hand, the idea that you could put together a viable coalition to pass social democratic reforms in the US without liberals is absolutely insane. (There’s also the fact that the most prominent self-described American socialist is a left-liberal, not an anti-liberal, but that’s a lesson for another day.)

As Jones says, what is true of this magazine is true more broadly — any “left” members of a red-brown alliance are either stooges or closest reactionaries, because they all become just brown in the end.