Hofer’s campaign manager then told the media that “Mr. Van der Bellen appears slow; in fact, he displays a certain exhaustion.” By June, the right-wing blog “Politically Incorrect” published a letter allegedly submitted to Austrian authorities asserting that Van der Bellen was stricken with dementia and cancer. So severe was his case — the fake letter attested — that Van der Bellen required a legal guardian.
.. The health issue was only one of several false rumors and reports — including allegations of Van der Bellen family ties to the Nazis — that his campaign has struggled to put down.
.. Trump-like slogans, meanwhile, have popped up on the Internet, including a hashtag for “Make Austria Great Again” and an Internet meme showing the country’s borders at the height of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
.. Should Hofer win, he would take over a ceremonial but constitutionally ambiguous job as president that he has contentiously vowed to vest with real power.
.. He might refuse, for instance, to sign Europe’s free trade deal with Canada and could call a referendum on the Paris Agreement to combat climate change. He has also flirted with a referendum on European Union membership — a possible death blow to the bloc following Britain’s vote to leave it... Hofer tends to portray the hosts of debates as well as his opponents as foolish when he is asked critical questions, and, in Trump-like fashion, he launches into unrelated attacks. When asked during a debate whether he should distance himself from Austria’s nationalistic fraternities long linked to racists, Hofer, for instance, attacked the questioner.“You are so desperate and depressed today. When I saw you six weeks ago, you were such a happy person,” he retorted.
.. In manner, Hofer is wholly unlike the bombastic Trump, speaking in an aw-shucks style that comes off as downright neighborly. Last month, he told Austrian broadcaster ZIB 2 that Trump’s election campaign had been “horrible.”
“I’m happy that we don’t have anything like this in this style in Austria,” he said.
.. His single biggest issue is immigration. He argues that at current birthrates, Muslim immigrants would soon overwhelm native Austrians.
.. Austria’s Identitarian activists — a far-right movement supporting ethno-European nationalism. While he has distanced himself from the movement, his party leadership has also cultivated it — sharing, for instance, stories sympathetic to the group on social media... “We want to disrupt the firewall of multicultural societies,” he said. “You did it in the U.S. with Trump. Now we want it here.”
Who Can Tell the Future of the Democratic Party?
The defeat of Hillary Clinton has revived with new intensity the conflict between proponents of identity politics — focusing electoral attention on African-Americans, Hispanics, women and the L.G.B.T. community — and those who advocate what they describe as a more universal strategy.
.. Lilla called for a “post-identity liberalism”
.. Clinton famously pointed out that
Taxes were lowered on the wealthiest people whose incomes were rising, and raised on middle class families as their incomes fell. And through it all, millions of decent, ordinary people who worked hard, played by the rules, and took responsibility for their own actions, were falling more and more behind, living a life of struggle without reward or security.
.. Anderson Cooper asked her: “Secretary Clinton, how would you not be a third term of President Obama?”
Clinton replied:
Well, I think that’s pretty obvious. I think being the first woman president would be quite a change from the presidents we’ve had up until this point, including President Obama.
Clinton’s comments at the debate and in Nevada were accurate but told voters nothing about how a Clinton presidency would improve their lives in ways that the Obama presidency had not.
.. One lesson of 2016 is that opposition to multiculturalism has become an extraordinarily powerful mobilizing tool for the right. It has spurred the emergence of a white lower- and middle-income Republican party while simultaneously invigorating the formerly insignificant alt-right and white supremacists generally.
The Crisis for Liberalism
has no choice but to start arguing about how it lost its way.
A lot of that argument already revolves around the concept of “identity politics,” used as shorthand for a vision of political liberalism as a coalition of diverse groups — gay and black and Asian and Hispanic and female and Jewish and Muslim and so on — bound together by a common struggle against the creaking hegemony of white Christian America.
.. instead 2016 exposed liberalism’s twofold vulnerability: to white voters embracing an identity politics of their own
.. So where religion atrophies, family weakens and patriotism ebbs, other forms of group identity inevitably assert themselves. It is not a coincidence that identity politics are particularly potent on elite college campuses, the most self-consciously post-religious and post-nationalist of institutions; nor is it a coincidence that recent outpourings of campus protest and activism and speech policing and sexual moralizing so often resemble religious revivalism.
The contemporary college student lives most fully in the Lennonist utopia that post-’60s liberalism sought to build, and often finds it unconsoling: She wants a sense of belonging, a ground for personal morality, and a higher horizon of justice than either a purely procedural or a strictly material politics supplies.
.. Thus it may not be enough for today’s liberalism, confronting both a right-wing nationalism and its own internal contradictions, to deal with identity politics’ political weaknesses by becoming more populist and less politically correct. Both of these would be desirable changes, but they would leave many human needs unmet. For those, a deeper vision than mere liberalism is still required — something like “for God and home and country,” as reactionary as that phrase may sound.
.. it is precisely older, foundational things that today’s liberalism has lost. Until it finds them again, it will face tribalism within its coalition and Trumpism from without, and it will struggle to tame either.
The Danger of a Dominant Identity
Crude tribal dividing lines inevitably arouse a besieged, victimized us/them mentality. This mentality assumes that the relations between groups are zero sum and antagonistic. People with this mentality tolerate dishonesty, misogyny and terrorism on their own side because all morality lays down before the tribal imperative.
The only way out of this mess is to continually remind ourselves that each human is a conglomeration of identities: ethnic, racial, professional, geographic, religious and so on.
.. Getting out of this mess also means accepting the limits of social science. The judgments of actual voters are better captured in the narratives of journalism and historical analysis than in the brutalizing correlations of big data.