Are they everywhere or are we paranoid?

Richard Fernandez @ Belmont Club

To hear tell there are now racists and Nazis everywhere. They lie in wait on freezing streets waiting to victimize people of color. They surround hapless native Americans in Washington with insulting smirks. They are depicted as driving around in trucks flying confederate flags chasing minority children. Racists are even able to masquerade as Democratic officials. Is there nothing they can't do?...

The year 2016 was a traumatic experience, shattering left wing sense of safety and dominance. Hillary's defeat -- and to a lesser extent Brexit and the rise of populism in Europe -- demonstrated the astonishing fragility of the mainstream liberal project and provided shocking proof that "the plague never dies". The boogeymen the progressives seek to exterminate can apparently resist any fumigation, indoctrination or persuasion leaving liberal activists like those characters in horror movies who shoot at Dracula without effect. This in turn led to renewed interest in outright socialism among Democrats. If Hillary and her billions proved useless against the MAGA werewolf perhaps Bernie Sanders and AOC have the silver bullet.

The alternative explanation is that there were serious defects in the liberal project and the pushback is due to those defects and not to some racist virus. That would explain 2016 too. Perhaps the most powerful contribution of the revolt against Bolivarianism in Venezuela is how it demonstrates that poor brown people can rise up against socialism without being members of the KKK. It's not always race but the economic system that makes the difference.

But this can hardly be persuasive to true believers for whom gender, race and sexual politics explain history. For them abortion, high taxes and a giant state are articles of faith and challenging them is evil. Words, arguments or symbolic proofs are largely useless against strongly held beliefs. Only experience can falsify -- and only temporarily -- cultic belief. In this respect Venezuela is also instructive. It changed. For decades Venezuela's poor held loyal to the belief that the socialists were on "their side". Now they are fighting Maduro....

Is the return of racists and Nazis the explanation for the current headlines? Or are people genuinely rising up against bloated incompetence? Time will tell. Reality always tells us which model is correct.