The term was born among surfers in Hawaii: Haule was the foreign surfer, invader of my beach. In democratic politics, what matters are values and programs: the destination of the journey. In identity politics, on the contrary, what matters is the remote origin of the individual: his “blood”, his “lineage” or “race”, not the place to which he goes.
Ancestry, that’s the word. suggests that “true Americans” are those whose ancestors were in the US during the Civil War. Nativism is a common feature of right-wing and left-wing identitarianism.
Viktor Orbán sustains his xenophobia based on the myth of the “Great Replacement”: the supposed “globalist” conspiracy to flood Europe with immigrants. The identitarian left promotes the idea of a single state in Palestine through the description of Israel as a European colonial implantation aimed at extirpating the “original people”.
Nativism, but not only. Right-wing identitarianism is distinguished from its left-wing version by a second founding element: Christianity. In the USA, the holy book of Maga, Trump’s movement, is the New Testament, not the Constitution. The conservative judges of the Supreme Court are guided by the originalist doctrine, that is, by the literal meaning of the constitutional text at the time it was written. How will they behave in the crucial trials of the systematic violations of the law committed by the White House?
Christianity, in this case, is not the generic adherence expressed by baptism, but the notion that social life must be governed by the “law of God”. Michelle Bolsonaro vocalizes this reactionary goal in Brazilian politics: Haule are the “deviants” on sexual orientation, the issue of abortion or the place of women and the family.
The fundamentalist Christian drift brings back classic anti-Semitism. The Heritage Foundation is pushing Trump to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Pat Buchanan, a notorious isolationist and anti-Semitic Republican who blames Churchill, not Hitler, for World War II. Tucker Carlson, Maga herald, spoke at Charlie Kirk’s funeral and compared him to Christ, “victimized by a bunch of guys eating hummus”, in a poorly understood reference to Jews.
The “stateless”, “globalist” or “imperialist” Jews are the iconic Haule. On the right, the source of anti-Semitism is the accusation that the Jews killed Christ. On the left, the conspiratorial narrative that associates Jews with global finance. The two sides meet in the thesis according to which Jews exercise hegemonic power in the USA through control of the “deep state”.
Identity politics tends towards entropy. On the left: the conflict between feminists and trans activists over the definition of the female sex or the challenge by “colorists”, the “real blacks”, to the official Brazilian racialism that distributes quotas to “half-whites”. On the right: the radicalization of nativism to the production of “local homelands”. The mayor of deports poor migrants at the bus station. The governor of Santa Catarina supports the invention of the internal border and is rehearsing the creation of a symbolic “state passport”, while Bolsonaro deputies from the state protest against the pre-candidacy of Haule Carlos Bolsonaro.
Haule take care. Hunting season reaches its peak.
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