Neema Parvini, also known as “Academic Agent,” has presented a view of this month’s political events that is not altogether dissimilar to what I’ve been arguing for decades. In “The Trump Assassination Attempt as Regime Off-Ramp to Dial Down the Heat,” Parvini insists there is no significant difference between our apparently warring candidates and ideological rallying points in today’s American politics. According to Parvini, the left doesn’t really hate Trump but is just going through the motions of opposing the Bad Orangeman. This bogus left is now joining with the fake right to “dial down” inflammatory political rhetoric that threatens their joint interests. What both sides desire is to remain part of the power establishment; and neither group eschews becoming woke to make itself fashionable to a progressive public.

According to Parvini, MAGA is:

… becoming increasingly diverse, pro-black, pro-gay and so on, achieving in actu what DEI [Diversity, Equity and Inclusion] only promised in theory. Again, while people at best laugh at this or at worst claim I am engaging in some sort of anti-Americanism; it is nonetheless, objectively, what has happened. MAGA America will not be the 2025 Project, it will be the Rufo Reich, more liberal, more democratic, more diverse than ever before but wrapped in the American flag not the rainbow one, in MAGA hats rather than pussyhats.

I’d be the last person to deny that Parvini’s argument contains elements of truth. Our political culture has moved catastrophically leftward in the last 60 years, thanks to a variety of baneful influences, including the Deep State academic institutions, popular culture, and the mainstream media. Moreover, in the last 20 years, all our vital social institutions have become gradually wokefied to a point that what would have been unimaginable to me as a young academic; and this wokeness has now been declared as the essence of our democratic (read: pseudo-democratic) life.

Equally discouraging, much of the acceptable right in the U.S. has fallen under neoconservative control (or what I call Conservatism, Inc.) and a foreign policy based on spreading or “defending” democracy and human rights abroad has been elevated to a much higher priority than upholding traditional moral and social norms at home. Although there’s been some pushback against these developments on the right, this resistance hasn’t been enough to stall the left’s cultural revolution.

Where I differ from Parvini is in how I judge those differences that exist within the present political situation. Unlike him, I think these differences are real and perceptible. It seems to me that it really matters whether J.D. Vance or whomever Kamala Harris picks to replace her in the number two spot is next our vice-president and it certainly matters whether Trump or Harris wins the presidential race.

Although the conservative establishment and media have relentlessly purged its right-wing members  (including me), I still find the Murdoch media more informative than listening to the blah-blah on NPR or MSNBC. Mind you, I believe that only a large, well-positioned, genuine right can win long-range political and cultural battles. In the meantime, however, I’ll take Trump with all his obvious deficiencies over the leftist totalitarians who oppose him. It does matter which side wins the November elections, although, I admit, not as much as we on the genuine right would like.

There are also important differences between the extent of leftist victories in this country and those that have been achieved in far more advanced leftist strongholds like Canada or Germany. Recently, the lunatic feminist German Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser closed down the German magazine Compact (not to be confused by the “post-liberal” American online magazine of the same name). Faeser justified her suppression of the German conservative antiwar publication, which has harshly criticized NATO and the West for the war in Ukraine, by smearing it as fascist-leaning and anti-Semitic. The editor Jürgen Elsässer used to publish in Chronicles and the charges against him and his magazine have about as much validity as the Democrats’ complaint that Trump is the new Hitler. Although the post-World War II American government and military “reeducated” the defeated Germans to become antifascist robots, Americans were spared such aggressive propaganda at the time. Moreover, we in the U.S. continue to enjoy more freedom than our German satellite and we have a much larger force of resistance to the left. 

Parvini may be roughly placed in the neoreactionary school of political thought that emphasizes the importance of the power of elites (over the power of ideas or populist movements, for example). He and others of this viewpoint assess the current moment as one in which the enemies of the genuine right are everywhere in power, only under slightly different guises. From what I can see, there are varying levels of badness in our decadent West, and not all of them are identical. Claiming that all established political parties are essentially a “uniparty” and that all apparent differences are fake makes it impossible to take advantage of opportunities to slow down the left, that is, to prevent us from becoming the woke cesspools into which Germany, France, Britain, Canada, and other “liberal democracies” have sunk—or are still sinking.

The remaining difference between us and them is not that we have a more brilliant or more courageous right than the Germans, French, British, or Canadians. We don’t, from what I can tell. I am at least as impressed by the European right as I am by our own (and here I’m not including the American Conservatism, Inc. blah-blah artists). What makes us different from these other places is the MAGA constituency, which is far greater in size and effect than any populist movement elsewhere in the Western world. Trump may not be the most principled or articulate leader of such a considerable force, but he does command a much larger resistance than one finds in France, Germany, Spain or anywhere in the leftist-occupied Anglosphere. And that ain’t nothing!