A Case Study in Nationalist Rhetoric

Right-wing extremism speaks in tongues, but it's never too late to learn a new language

Trump’s gone but his authoritarian ethno-nationalist worldview sure isn’t. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Donald Trump once suggested, through the approving quotation of a radical right-wing fundamentalist Christian pastor, that his impeachment would cause a civil war.

This didn’t turn out to be true. But there’s a sense in which Trump losing the election, and then lying like crazy to persuade his followers that it was stolen from him, did spark a low-grade civil war. The January 6th MAGA insurrection was driven by the same logic underlying Jeffress’ Trump-endorsed tweet. The common sentiment — that the party of the urban multicultural majority is enemy to the authentic American volk and thus has no legitimate claim to power — may be seditious and deranged, there’s a coherent worldview behind it: hard-right, populist ethno-nationalism.

A group of Republican voters. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Trump may be gone, for now, but his political worldview hasn’t. His populist ethno-nationalism remains the de facto philosophy of the Republican Party. It might be a good idea to understand it a bit better, right?

That’s easier said than done.

It’s tough to get your head around the internal logic of this fascistic creed because it’s almost never clearly laid out. But why is that? Because it’s too ugly to look straight in the face. It is a worldview so odious that clearly stating its principles in public tends to undermine its appeal and prospects. As a matter of political necessity, then, it’s a worldview spoken in tongues.

That makes it damnably difficult to argue against. How do you rebut a political philosophy that nobody will clearly articulate? Whenever a critic does manage to clearly lay out the animating principles of populist ethno-nationalism, its adherents vociferously deny them and accuse the critic of slander. That’s the grift: political gain through mendacious obfuscation under the cover of patriotism. That’s why dishonesty, contempt for the truth, hostility toward reasoned public deliberation, and demagogic attacks on the credibility of rivals are essential to the success of any populist, ethno-nationalist movement.

Breaking the Code

To better understand how the ethnonationalist’s repugnant commitments are conveyed but made plausibly deniable through coded, it helps to break down an example. I’ve found Trump’s mortifying September 2019 address to the United States General Assembly an especially illuminating example of coded nationalist rhetoric.

Trump appeared as though he had neither slept nor perused his speech in advance. Nancy Pelosi had announced the beginning of formal impeachment proceedings the day before and I guess Trump didn’t take it in stride. Addressing the assembled representatives of the nations of Earth, Trump projected the infirm air of an elderly ex-prizefighter as he struggled visibly to translate the orthographic mysteries of the teleprompter into a soft, dazed, halting monotone.

Trump’s typical posturing bravado conjures a mesmerizing atmosphere of con-man hyperbole that compels you to check for your wallet and apply a “literal but not serious,” or “serious but not literal,” discount to his typical stream of coded authoritarian jingo. This malicious pizzazz was entirely absent from Trump’s droning delivery and squinting dourness at the U.N. Shorn of strongman bluster, the president’s familiar nationalist platitudes staggered into the light naked, weak, desperate, and false. It was, I thought, the most honest performance of Trump’s presidency.

And that’s what makes this speech an unusually good candidate for analytic and rhetorical dissection. So let’s slice open the guts of the Trump’s nationalist worldview and see what they’re full of.

I was especially struck by a passage in the speech connecting the Second Amendment to the herrenvolk’s special role in containing the “tyranny” and “domination” of other Americans who “believe they’re entitled to wield power and control over others.”

You may want to watch this section first, because the sheer creepiness of Trump’s plodding, rote delivery doesn’t come through in the transcript.

The relationship between belligerent gun-rights absolutism and illiberal hostility to democracy implied in this passage was the theme of a Times column I’d published a few days before this chilling snoozefest of a speech. It was satisfying, in a morbid way, to see Trump underscoring the validity of a major premise of my argument: that right-wing radicals flip their MAGA caps over moderate gun control proposals because they think that the conservative, white Christian minority is exclusively entitled to power; that constitutional democracy is tyrannical if “patriots” don’t control it; and that they therefore obviously need guns to make sure they don’t lose control to majorities of technically-but-not-really-Americans. After all, those people might want to make laws or interpret the Constitution in ways that can’t possibly be legitimate, because those people don’t really love America.

It shouldn’t be hard to see how this set of ideas relates to the notion that inherently illegitimate Democrats ousting Trump from office, whether through the ballot box or an impeachment trial, would merit violent retaliation.

Of course, Trump never comes right out and says any of this in an honest, uncowardly way, because stating this position frankly makes it a little too clear that it’s an argument against the fundamental American idea of republican self-government. White-identity populism is popular only when it speaks in star-spangled riddles.

It’s worth breaking Trump’s passage on gun rights and closely inspecting some its rhetorical moves as a way of unpacking the worldview of this sly mode of authoritarian chauvinism:

The United States will always uphold our constitutional right to keep and bear arms; we will always uphold our Second Amendment.

First, this is aspirational. If the Constitution could not be amended, there could be no Second Amendment. Because it could be amended again, the claim that “we will always uphold our Second Amendment” is either a prediction, an expression of hope, or a call to arms, figurative or literal.

Second, it’s useful to read this sentence as implicitly stipulative. Trump refers to “our” Constitution and “our” Second Amendment, because he’s addressing a room of people who are citizens of many different countries with many different constitutions. “Our” implies an “us” — Americans. But who counts as one of us — as a fully fledged American — is the crux of the entire right-populist enterprise and the implicit populist model of exclusive authentic citizenship infects even standard conservative and libertarian thinking about the Constitution. The rest of the passage makes more sense if you read “our Constitution” in the exclusive right-populist sense.

So, how is it stipulative? As it has been historically interpreted by the courts, the Second Amendment didn’t rule out strict regulation of gun ownership, and it still doesn’t. Until 1868, the Second Amendment didn’t apply to states at all. The currently prevailing interpretation, which is newer than some t-shirts I own, recognizes a right to own a gun for self-defense within your home, but it doesn’t rule out bans on assault weapons.

Our Second Amendment, however, lives in the heads of “patriots,” people who count as real Americans, not in any official legal text. The notional Constitution of self-styled patriots rules out restrictions on the sale and ownership of AR-15s, and who knows what else, even if the Second Amendment, as currently embodied in law, does not.

By consistently collapsing the distinction between actual constitutional law and their dogmatic minority cartoon version of the Constitution, nationalists transform disagreement with their Constitution into threats to the nation’s constitutional order — even if that disagreement accords with current law or two-hundred years of judicial interpretation. To disagree with our Second Amendment is to deny a fundamental right critical to the framework of the republic in our heads. It doesn’t matter if no such right has ever been legally recognized. It doesn’t matter if the contrary position is nothing but an endorsement of longstanding precedent, an argument for judicial reinterpretation, or a proposal for an amendment that the Constitution is expressly intended to accommodate.

Once you’ve stuffed this rabbit firmly into your tri-corner hat, you can grab it by the ears and begin to withdraw it to the astonishment of the crowd. You will assert that the mere existence of a disagreement about the proper interpretation of the Second Amendment shows that the constitutional order that exists in our heads is imperiled. Of course, this peril consists in nothing more than the fact that a majority of Americans hold different opinions about desirable public policy and constitutional interpretation. But the meaning of the Constitution implied by these opinions (including the prevailing position of the current judiciary) isn’t the same as the meaning of the Constitution-in-our-heads, which is the real American Constitution for real Americans! So “they,” the constitutional heretics, are ipso facto disqualified from inclusion in the authentic American “us.”

Now, there are a lot of “them.” A whole lot more than “us,” it turns out. But this fact can never be taken imply that, just maybe, “we” are confused, or have made some kind of mistake. Because that’s impossible! The whole point of this festival of bad-faith sophistry is that “we” can’t be wrong. Only real Americans can be the authoritative arbiters of who the real Americans are, and only real Americans can be the authoritative arbiters of the meaning of the Constitution — it’s the one in our heads — and we, the real Americans, have declared have ourselves the real Americans. So we’re right! QED.

The fact that a majority of merely technical Americans have a different opinion can only mean that they are collectively very dangerous! And this perception of existential threat to the constitutional republic that lives in our heads explains why our Second Amendment rights are so vitally necessary to the defense of the system of government we have stipulatively defined in terms of our stipulatively defined rights. Presto!

The radical view of gun rights embodied in our Second Amendment tends to generate this sort of magically self-validating argument again and again. If this seems uncharitably speculative to you, pay close attention to where this chunk of Trump’s speech ends up:

The core rights and values America defends today were inscribed in our nation’s founding documents.

The point of this is to sanctify the rights and values of our Second Amendment, and our Constitution more generally, by packing them into a time machine and dumping them in 1780s Philadelphia and Montpelier — a sort of rhetorical inception into the collective consciousness of America’s legitimating founding myth. That’s how you turn a contemporary disagreement about the regulation of bleeding-edge murder engines into an affront to James Madison’s personal honor.

The Bill of Rights is a founding document, no doubt. But what about the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments? The Reconstruction Amendments re-founded the United States after the Civil War, recast the meaning of the rest of the Constitution in the light of equality, and applied the Bill of Rights to the states. Do you suppose that’s how Trump and his most zealous supporters see it? Are equal legal protection, birthright citizenship, and the prohibition of discrimination in voting “core rights and values America defends today”? It certainly doesn’t seem like it.

Because that would be the Constitution, not our Constitution. During Trump’s term, our Constitution was notably indifferent to the enumerated powers of Congress to oversee and investigate that executive branch. But as soon Republicans regain a majority in the House or Senate, the whiplash pivot on Congress’s constitutional authority will break your neck. The only jurisprudential principle of populist nationalism is “whatever it takes.” We’re seeing it action in the Senate GOP’s sudden discovery of a venerable constitutional principle forbidding the impeachment of ex-presidents. This approach is often labeled, ironically enough, “constitutional conservatism.”

Our nation’s founders understood that there will always be those who believe they’re entitled to wield power and control over others.

Our nation’s founders’ primary solutions to this fact of political life were government by (a) elected representative assemblies; (b) separation of legislative, judicial, and executive powers; (c) requirements for the concurrence of divided authorities; (d) a decentralized federal structure. Trump was never a fan of any of this. His GOP heirs don’t care about any of it either, unless it works to their advantage.

Now, it’s true that many of our founding plantation masters understood themselves pretty well, and they certainly believed that they were entitled to wield power and control over others. Indeed, they went through a good deal of trouble to inscribe their sense of entitlement to living human property into our nation’s founding documents. As it happens, the Second Amendment reflects slave state anxieties that federal control of militias might eventually disarm slave patrols, imperiling the effectiveness of the police state apparatus required to keep the slave system in place.

But I’m aggravating even myself by bringing this up! What does it have to do with anything? Sure, it’s history. But it’s, like, 1619 Project history, not 1776 Commision history — our history. Which is to say, it’s disloyal, un-American self-loathing. A free and patriotic people shouldn’t have to hear it.

Remember, Trump is still speaking in the context of gun rights. The idea is that they’re necessary to fend off those who feel entitled to wield power and control over others. Who exactly might that be? People who won’t shut up about slavery is a probably a good place to start.

Tyranny advances under many names and many theories, but it always comes down to the desire for domination. It protects not the interests of many, but the privilege of few.

Here Trump engages in an incisive bit self-analysis and projects it onto his political rivals. “I am rubber, you are glue” is perhaps his favorite move. It’s true that there are many names under which tyranny advances, but I think we’re mainly meant to conjure up “socialism” and “tyranny of the majority.” Socialism and majority rule, despite their associations with “the many,” are ultimately schemes of corrupt elites to manipulate the masses into defending their wicked, dominating escapades. “What bounces off me sticks to you!”

Our founders gave us a system designed to restrain this dangerous impulse. They chose to entrust American power to those most invested in the fate of our nation, a proud and fiercely independent people.

I’ve outlined the main lines of this republican system above. But Trump’s not really talking about that. He’s still riffing around the sanctity of gun rights and situating them in a broader discussion of the best distribution of political power. This is where the magic really happens, folks! This is where Trump pulls the authority-of-the-minority populist rabbit out to the hat of exclusive national membership into which he already stuffed it.

Maybe it’s merely incidental, but Trump is suddenly pretty straightforwardly accurate about history here — in the most unpleasant way imaginable. Our founders did in fact choose to entrust American power more or less exclusively to white men with property. They were literally “most invested in the fate of our nation” in the standard financial sense of “invested.” And that was, in fact, one of the main reasons the franchise was so severely restricted. Even the implied idea here, that they felt they needed guns to protect their investments, is basically correct. The advance of those less invested in the fate of their nation threatened their yields.

But that’s just more 1619 gibberish, which obviously isn’t what he has in mind. The general intended message is really just that it’s good and proper that “American power” not be entrusted to everyone, but only to those with the right kind of “skin in the game,” so to speak.

The true good of the nation can only be pursued by those who love it, by citizens who are rooted in its history, who are nourished by its culture, committed to its values, attached to its people, and who know that its future is theirs to build, or theirs to lose.

At this point, a six-year-old should be able to work the ethno-nationalist decoder ring. Who does not love the nation? Democrats! Democratic congresswomen of color, in particular. Or anyone who doesn’t want to build a wall on the border, or who lives in a hellhole “sanctuary city,” which is just another way to say Democrats. Ungrateful black athletes, like Colin Kaepernick, rank high on list of America haters. People who won’t shut up about slavery, who believe that Joe Biden won the election, and so on. None among them can pursue the true good of the nation.

Who isn’t rooted in the nation’s history? Immigrants! Who isn’t committed to its values? Liberals, socialists, city folk, etc. That’s pretty much the entire population of people who voted Donald Trump out of office. To say that they can’t pursue the true good of the nation is to say that when they pursue their good, it’s not the good of the nation, because they aren’t fully vested members of the nation. It is to say that Democrats are people to whom “American power” should not be entrusted, because they aren’t patriots. And that’s why patriots need guns. This country’s just rife with these unpatriotic people. That poses the unacceptable risk that they could “win” a bunch of elections — they just did! — and then pass a bunch laws that violate the bedrock conditions of legitimate political authority filed away in patriots’ heads under “our Constitution.”

Patriots see a nation and its destiny in ways no one else can. Liberty is only preserved, sovereignty is only secured, democracy is only sustained, greatness is only realized by the will and devotion of patriots.

“Patriots” are members of a group of mostly white conservatives who identify the boundaries of national membership with the boundaries of their ethnocultural group, which transfigures their minority factional interests into the national interest, and turns minority factional rule into a condition for national sovereignty. Rabbit, meet hat. If power is entrusted to a rival political faction, “patriots” are by definition oppressed, sovereignty is violated, democracy has lost its legitimacy, and American greatness gives way to decline. The destruction of our republic, our Constitution, can be prevented only through will and devotion of patriots — armed patriots, with plenty of bullets.

And there you have the logic behind the idea that armed insurrection ought to be an expected and completely reasonable response to the impeachment or electoral defeat of Donald Trump, the embodiment of the true sovereign people, by Democrats who cannot pursue the “true good of the nation” and cannot be entrusted with “American power.”

Confronting Bad Faith, Gaslighting and Lies

Okay, enough. This kind of Talmudic parsing of public-facing ethno-nationalist texts always makes me feel more than a little crazy. But that’s the point of speaking in dog-whistling cipher. Unsympathetic public translation is supposed to make you feel crazy. People who agree explicitly and self-consciously with the underlying message read straight through the rhetorical fog in which its enfolded. They know that the rhetoric is designed for plausible deniability. They know how to exploit this to publicly deny that it means what it means and they know how to ridicule and undermine anyone who offers an accurate but hostile gloss. (Whatever you do, don’t tell a joke underlining the fact that a ravening pack of these goons wanted to hang Mike Pence for his loyalty to the Constitution.)

I believe the key to the whole dynamic of nationalist obfuscation is that people who don’t really get it, but who do thrill to the general flag-waving, chest-thumping mood, are generally inside the nationalist target demographic. (If they weren’t, they’d sense, more or less vaguely, that they’re being threatened, and feel strongly put off by the whole thing.) Over time, repeat exposure and attachment to this sort of rhetoric tends to draw those who vibe with the surface rhetoric deeper and deeper into the ethno-nationalist worldview until the unveiled message begins to feel natural and sensible. However, if the message had been right on the surface from the start, they’d have been repelled.

That’s why it’s important for people who self-consciously approve of the underlying message to make people who get it but hate it appear like uncharitable, uncivil, ax-grinding kooks when they try to explain it. Letting guys like me get away with it hurts recruiting. So, if you do go ahead and lay out a critical translation, like the one I’ve offered here, you’re likely to recognize that you have outlined a view almost no one publicly voices and attributed it to a huge number of people who deny that they embrace it. And you’re likely to understand that people who actually do self-consciously embrace it will definitely attack you for slandering them. In the face of all this, it’s impossible not to doubt yourself and take pause. Which is the point.

The mainstream media is constitutionally unable to navigate this crazy-making bad faith, so it generally sticks to reporting the message of the surface rhetoric, unless it crosses over some established bright line of socially unacceptable dog-whistling. Even in that kind of case, they tend not to attribute the well-understood coded meaning to the speaker, but tend instead to report on the indignation of people who do, and on the backlash to that indignation from the speaker’s defenders. But this exceedingly cautious approach rarely keeps the press from getting roughed up by bad-faith nationalists anyway. They’ll attack and gaslight you whether you’ve clearly stated or merely insinuated the truth about them. It’s effective. That’s why rhetoric like Trump’s ends up getting an astonishing amount of uncontested face-value coverage. Again, that’s the point.

Demagogic ethno-nationalist political rhetoric is insidious. It’s a form of asymmetric warfare. When it gets as big a megaphone as Trump had, the reach and repetition of the message is overwhelming. Attempts to directly combat it are generally muted, self-censored, or contained to insular partisan channels. Once this genie’s out of the bottle, it poisons political discourse, which makes it nearly impossible to get it back in. That’s why we’re still in a heap of trouble, despite the fact that the big mouth and his megaphone are gone.

But that doesn’t mean that those determined to fight back against it are helpless. One of the wonders and terrors of the internet is that boundaries between public and private conversations have become incredibly porous, and it’s now a breeze to listen in on discussions not intended to be public facing. If you’ve spent the past three years listening closely to Trump, Steve Bannon, Steven Miller, Tucker Carlson, etc., the loyalist media ecosystem around them, and poking into forums and message boards populated with their enthusiastic fans, you don’t need to guess what the quiet part sounds like when it’s said out loud. Devoted ethno-nationalists confidently display their code-switching abilities in thousands of places thousands of times each day. There’s no reason not to learn the code-book and confidently deploy it to explain and criticize views that hard-right nationalists are eager to voice when they don’t think you’re hanging around.

- WW