After the September 11 attacks by Islamist extremists, article after article asked, Why do they hate us? They now includes America’s fringe right: white supremacists, Proud Boys, and “the civil war-hungry Boogaloo Bois,” writes Michelle Goldberg.
Goldberg cites a suspended right-wing Twitter account that celebrated the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban as a defeat for liberalism: “Liberalism did not fail in Afghanistan because it was Afghanistan, it failed because it was not true. It failed America, Europe and the world see it.” A white supremacist here, an account linked to the Proud Boys there expressed admiration for the Taliban: “They took back their national religion as law, and executed dissenters. Hard not to respect that.”
Donald Trump falsley claimed that in covereage of the 9/11 attacks he’d seen people on TV “cheering on the other side of New Jersey, where you have large Arab populations. They were cheering as the World Trade Center came down.” Trump’s claims were bogus. The cheers of the fringe right for the Taliban are archived on the internet.
Voices on the right such as Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz find more legitimacy in the Taliban than our own government.
Goldberg writes:
At least before the devastating terrorist attacks on Thursday, there was a subtler form of satisfaction with the Taliban’s takeover among more respectable nationalist conservatives. They don’t sympathize with barbarism, but were pleased to see liberal internationalism lose. “The humiliation of Afghanistan will have been worth it if it pries the old paradigm loose and lets new thoughts in,” Yoram Hazony, an influential nationalist intellectual whose conferences feature figures like Josh Hawley and Peter Thiel, tweeted earlier this month.
What old paradigm? Well, a few days later he tweeted, “What went wrong in Iraq and Afghanistan was, first and foremost, the ideas in the heads of the people running the show. Say its name: Liberalism.”
Fox’s Tucker Carlson, the most important nationalist voice in America, seemed to sympathize with the gender politics of Taliban-supporting Afghans. “They don’t hate their own masculinity,” he said shortly after the fall of Kabul. “They don’t think it’s toxic. They like the patriarchy. Some of their women like it too. So now they’re getting it all back. So maybe it’s possible that we failed in Afghanistan because the entire neoliberal program is grotesque.” (By “neoliberalism” he seems to mean social liberalism, not austerity economics.)
Perhaps it was a sense of humliation at stalemated American incursions that fueled the rise of Donald Trump, Goldberg suggests, citing “Reign of Terror” by Spencer Ackerman.
Humiliation is a volatile emotion. Many have written about its role in motivating Al Qaeda. Perhaps it’s not surprising that parts of the right would respond to humiliation by identifying with images of brutal masculinity.
But perhaps post-9/11 wars are not the real source of the American right’s sense of humiliation. Elliot Rodger became an incel hero (“involuntarily celibate”) for killing six people in a stabbing and shooting spree in Isla Vista, California, in May 2014. Rodger was exacting misogynist retribution on a world in which he “could not comprehend why women would not want to have sex with him.”
Others on the fringe right might find humiliation in the prospect of having to share power in this country with an emerging non-white, multicultural, multireligious, non-patriarcal society of the sort the Taliban wants to eradicate from Afghanistan. Perhaps “the pro-Taliban right, the Proud Boys and incels and MAGA splinter factions” are just trolling in celebrating the Taliban takeover, Goldberg suggests.
Or perhaps they cannot comprehend why the U.S. would not want to be dominated by them.