Bootleggers and Baptists. The public choice economist Bruce Yandle coined the phrase to describe how apparently opposed groups might have a shared interest in government regulation — in that case, Prohibition.
I wonder, though, whether his concept has a wider application. Which political groups benefit most from the Donald Trump presidency? His own supporters, naturally; but also those like Zohran Mamdani, whose voters were motivated by a desire to poke Trump in the eye.
Similarly, who does best out of Mamdani’s win? Socialists, yes; but also the spicier end of the MAGA spectrum, the folks who thrive on the sense of political crisis, the fear that the country is falling into the hands of their enemies.
Bootleggers and Baptists. Each side points at the other to motivate its base. A similar symbiosis exists in Britain between Tommy Robinson and the Islamists. Each is able to tell its supporters, “that is what the other lot really think about you when their guard is down.”
Thus we have, on the one hand, candidates who endorse the world view (if not the methods) of BLM and Antifa: America is intrinsically racist, the police are the natural enemy of minorities, capitalism makes people greedy.
On the other, we see the bizarre acceptability of views that are genuinely Nazi, from the fad for the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt to the spate of NatCon pamphlets attacking democracy. We see people like Nick Fuentes being given space by what were, until five minutes ago, mainstream conservative think-tanks.
Leftists have for a long time had a bizarre hypochondria about fascism. Almost any mainstream conservative position, from gun rights to tax cuts, has been written off at some point as fascist. Indeed, this tendency had already started when fascist parties still ran chunks of Europe.
“The word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless,” wrote George Orwell during World War two. “I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.”
This hypochondria creates a semantic problem. If you gaily threw the word fascist at George Bush, John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Donald Trump, what do you call Nick Fuentes? What word is left for someone who downplays the Holocaust, justifies Hitler and thinks that Jews are too powerful? Someone who calls Vice President JD Vance “a fat race-mixer who’s married to a jeet, who named his son Vivek,” and who complains that he was mentored by “a Jewish neocon and a gay fed”?
There have always been people who held Fuentes’s opinions. Until recently, though, they were shunned by conservatives, for whom a commitment to constitutional democracy was non-negotiable. Now, not so much. Fuentes’s racism against people of South Asian heritage (which is what he means by “jeet”) is widely taken up by young conservatives online. I sense that the adults hang back from condemning it, because they don’t like being piranha-shoaled by his followers, the groypers.
And so, bit by bit, anti-Indian prejudice moves from groypers to influencers. Laura Ingraham complains that “any trade deal with India will require us to give them more visas.” Steve Bannon declares, “instead of stapling a green card to their diploma, staple an exit visa.” Governors and congressmen begin to come out against the visa program — not because they dislike Indians, who are among the most successful of all immigrant groups, but because they don’t want the abuse from sections of their base.
Perhaps the Great Realignment was always going to end up here. Once culture replaces economics as the primary division, opinions harden. Each side gets into a purity-spiral, talking only to itself, demonizing the other for online likes.
Mamdani will fail. New York will become poorer, dirtier and more crime-ridden and, eventually, there will be an electoral correction.
But what of the other side? What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? Look at the chronological progression — John McCain, Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes.
IT’S DANGEROUS TO BE AN AMERICAN ALLY
The people who should be calling a halt to all this, focusing on bread-and-butter issues like — well, like the price of bread and butter — are drowned out. Each side turns to more authoritarian forms of politics in response to the other. The worst are filled with passionate intensity.
The bootleggers and the Baptists agree that they want a powerful state that they can turn against their enemies. The notion that both sides are better off when the power of government is limited seems suddenly passé. Once it has gone, it will not be easily restored.
