The Conservative Political Action Conference—which Donald Trump is slated to headline this weekend—started Wednesday with a self-proclaimed “international summit.” Seated at long tables, arranged in a rectangle, were representatives from the far-right movements of half a dozen countries with little flags in front of them. Nigel Farage, former leader of the nativist UK Independence Party, sat between Hungarian Ambassador Szabolcs Takács and his own country’s former prime minister, Liz Truss.
Jikidō “Jay” Aeba represented the Japanese Conservative Union. (Aeba’s “Happiness Realization Party” has called for a nuclear-armed Japan and denies that the 1937 Nanjing Massacre happened.) Argentina’s far-right security minister Patricia Bullrich sat next to Rabbi Yitz Tendler, head of the pro-settler Young Jewish Conservatives and CPAC Senior Fellow for Israel and Jewish Affairs. At the head table sat Steve Bannon, in a frumpy military-style jacket and his trademark three black shirts, two of them collared.
“I first came to CPAC in 2012, and I was the only foreign speaker on the stage, The only one,” Farage said, once given a microphone. “And as the years have gone by, we’ve seen more and more people coming together. CPAC itself has been an extraordinary international movement … The globalist narrative that somehow we’re isolationists, we don't want to work together. Not only do we want to work together internationally, we need to work internationally to combat the great threats we face in the world.”
Listening to him, I couldn’t help but think of the 1934 conference in Montreux, Switzerland, organized by the Italian Comitati d'Azione per l'Universalità di Roma. Organized by agents of Benito Mussolini, the conference was an attempt at the creation of a Fascist International, which would bring together European movements including Romania’s Iron Guard, the Greek National Socialists, the Spanish Fallangists, the French Mouvement Franciste, and so on. It failed, somewhat predictably, because the nationalists couldn’t get along. (Both Mussolini’s Fascisti and the Nazis avoided the summit, in the latter case because the Nazis had just assassinated the Austrofascist Austrian chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, and in the former because Mussolini wanted to be sure the effort got off the ground before associating himself with it.) As Federico Finchelstein has written: “The relationship between fascism and the nation was always ambivalent, since fascism was both a global ideology and an extreme form of nationalism.”
CPAC 2024 in many respects resembles a soft reboot of Montreux. It featured a speech by El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, the “world’s coolest dictator,” as his fanboys call him, who ranted about George Soros. (I did a podcast on Bukele’s third-positionist authoritarianism with Michael Paarlberg last year.) Argentina’s self-described anarcho-capitalist right-populist president, Javier Milei, is also on the docket. Later this year, CPAC will hold its third European conference in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. As the CPAC-Hungary website says, last year’s conference in Budapest caused “the left-liberal world” to “[erupt] in hysteria … with good reason.” The conference, it said, “concentrated on the liberals' nightmare: the international convergence of national forces.” Geert Wilders, the wildly Islamophobic would-be Dutch prime minister, is among those slated to attend.
Buttons from the CPAC Hungary conference, with the Orbanite slogan “no migration, no gender, no war” have also been seen all over the DC event.
Back in DC (actually the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland), this year’s CPAC opened with an event hosted by Steve Bannon, at which he was presented with a painting featuring a giant Q (almost certainly representing QAnon) over a tapestry that included the American flag and the Hollywood sign. In the video, the gifter, who said he was named Spencer Reyes, gave a short talk weaving conspiritualist invocations of “light and honesty” with “parallel pollises”—a term identified by the Hungarian scholar Balazs Trencsenyi as an “antidemocratic and often ethno-nationalist” vision in which neofascists “concurrent cultural infrastructure (ranging from ideologically committed media to an alternative art academy) that would ‘re-conquer’ the public sphere from the representatives of ‘alien interests.’”
“Steve’s a big proponent of that,” Reyes said.
CPAC in general has become a kind of “parallel polis” fiesta. Only right-wing media have been given credentials this year; anyone who organizers think might represent a liberal or left-wing view has been banned. Rumble, the far-right alternative to YouTube, is the official video streaming platform. And while everyone from failed GOP candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to deposed former reactionary Roman Catholic Bishop Joseph Strickland have been given prime speaking slots, Nikki Haley, the sole non-Trump candidate still in the Republican race for president is nowhere to be seen.
And the transnationalism goes both ways. Liz Truss blamed her 50-day prime ministership on a "woke” Bannonite “deep state” in London. “Now people are joining the civil service who are essentially activists,” she said, according to the Guardian. “They might be trans activists, they might be environmental extremists but they are now having a voice within the civil service in a way I don’t think was true 30 or 40 years ago. So we just have a wholly new problem and, frankly, a hundred political appointees doesn’t even touch the sides in terms of dealing with them.”
By pointing out the transnational nature of all of this, I don’t mean to imply that these thoughts are deeply intellectual. They are extremely dumb. But that doesn’t make them any less dangerous. In a viral video from the same Bannon CPAC event, Jack Posobiec, the far-right troll, gleefully declared: “Welcome to the end of democracy! We’re here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6th, but we will endeavor to get rid of it and replace it with this right here.” (Note: I originally thought he was raising just his fist. A reader says he was holding a crucifix.) Bannon replies: “All right! Amen!” To which Posobiec answered: “That’s right, because all glory is not to government, all glory to God.”
In a live recording of Bannon’s podcast, War Room, his co-host asked, “How much retribution do Republicans want?” Bannon replied: “All of it. Is unlimited an option? Do you want retribution?” When the crowd cheered, he said: “It's because they stole your country, right? And they're trying to destroy it. It's earned retribution, is it not?”
And Stephen Miller, Trump’s anti-immigrant consigliere, used his CPAC event to lay out the administration’s plans. The moderator referred to Biden as “importing 10 million people into this country” who “don’t share our values” and “don’t want to assimilate, many of them” — an invocation of the neo-Nazi “Great Replacement Theory” — then asked Miller what should be done to fix “this invasion of our southern border.” Miller’s response was unequivocal: “Seal the border. Deport all the illegals,” for which he got a big round of applause. “You would establish a large-scale staging grounds for removal flights. So you grab illegal immigrants, and then you move them to the staging grounds, and that’s where the planes are waiting.” In addition to these concentration camps, Miller called for the U.S. military to establish “a fortress position on the border and to say no one can cross here at all.”
This is, again, the irony of fascism: a global movement against “globalism”; a multiethnic ideology of ethno-nationalist supremacy; a violently xenophobic ideology that is growing and spreading through international cooperation. It ultimately failed in the 1930s. American conservatives can’t wait to give it another go.
Updates 2/25/24: Corrected spelling of Montreux and nationality of Geert Wilders
