On decay – William Davies in LRB:

“Over the last fifteen years, I’ve lost count of the number of calls I’ve heard for a ‘Mont Pelerin of the left’, a reference to the international network first convened in 1947 by Friedrich Hayek to lay down the intellectual building blocks of a neoliberal future (the Mont Pelerin Society still meets to this day). Hayek had in turn been influenced by the example of the decidedly elitist Fabian Society, which aimed to put advanced social science in the service of social engineering. The most ambitious recent attempt to overturn Hayek’s legacy was made by the Hewlett Foundation, which pledged $20 million in 2018 and a further $50 million in 2020 to research projects, largely based at US universities, engaged in mapping out a post-neoliberal future. This was one response to the shock of the first Trump victory in 2016, which brought home the need to tackle the economic, social and political decay that was eating the US from within.”

(…)

“But as Ganz shows in a series of biographical portraits, a distinctive set of proto-Trumpian sentiments began to seep into the American public sphere no sooner than the rubble of the Berlin Wall had been tidied away.
In hindsight, four figures in particular stand out: Sam Francis, Pat Buchanan, Murray Rothbard and Ross Perot. Francis was, and remains, a comparatively obscure figure in American conservative intellectual and journalistic circles. But he was decisive in introducing to mainstream discourse the racist ideas of figures such as David Duke, which were unacceptable to the Republican Party of the time. Writing in the early 1980s, Francis already sounded like a MAGA provocateur: ‘The New Right is not a conservative force but a radical or revolutionary one.’ Its aim, he argued, should be the restoration of natural inequalities, in which racial difference played an undeniable part. Francis reimagined nationalism not as the assertion of the nation-state (which invariably meant elevating managerial elites, who would cavort with other elites in global institutions), but as a cultural phenomenon which would defend America from immigration, liberalism and government.”

(…)

“One riddle that all paleos faced in the early 1990s was how to co-ordinate a mass movement and set out a political programme even while attacking the established government, media and public institutions that would be needed to carry out such a programme. Talk radio provided part of the answer, channelling and fuelling the white male rage that was becoming an increasingly prominent force in American politics. Within twenty years, social media platforms would provide the tools for the propagation of resentment-based populism.”

(…)

“In summer 1991, with the Soviet Union collapsing, Richard Nixon of all people privately circulated a memo, ‘How to lose the Cold War’, in which he criticised the West’s failure to support a sustainable transition out of communism for its former foe. ‘If Yeltsin fails,’ Nixon wrote, ‘the prospects for the next fifty years will turn grim. The Russian people will not turn back to communism. But a new, more dangerous despotism based on extremist Russian nationalism will take power.’ A year later, David Duke was interviewed by a nationalist Russian paper. Asked if he would support a move against Yeltsin, he replied: ‘I will support a man or a party in Russia who will help Russians become strong. I don’t care if they follow certain articles of the constitution or not. I think Russia needs a strong personality in order to overcome all the difficulties.’ Neither Nixon nor Duke was schooled in ‘realist’ theories of international relations – they just called it as they saw it. But at a time when a quasi-Hegelian, neoconservative worldview was taking hold, according to which all peoples of the world would eventually conform to the model of the US, elites took little interest in the politics of resentment or ‘strong men’. In time, that politics would take an interest in them.”

Read the article here.

So, the turning point was not 2001, it started much earlier.

And Richard Nixon did something right, late in life.

The MAGA is nothing but the revenge of the marginalized, or of those who felt grudges and concluded we must be the truly marginalized.