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James Kirchick

James Kirchick, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, columnist at Tablet magazine, and correspondent for The Daily Beast, is the author of The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age (2017). He is writing a history of gay Washington, D.C. (January 2018)

Follow James Kirchick on Twitter: @jkirchick.

NYR DAILY

A Thing for Men in Uniforms

The Stadium Mussolini in Rome, Italy, 1934

“He has all that virility,” Steve Bannon told The Spectator of London. “He also had amazing fashion sense, right, that whole thing with the uniforms.” Social media feeds lit up with quips about the homoerotic subtext of Bannon’s Mussolini crush. This may have been an unexpected instance of a connection made between fascism and gay masculinism, but it is hardly without precedent. If fascism has had an allure for gay men, it is anti-egalitarianism that provides the connective tissue—the belief that homosexuality belongs to an elite caste.

Trump’s Debt to Ron Paul’s Paranoid Style

Texas Congressman Ron Paul, at his Republican presidential primary campaign headquarters in Concord, New Hampshire, in November 2007

Though Ron Paul is often described as an orthodox libertarian, his ideology is more accurately described as paleolibertarian, which shares the limited government principles of traditional libertarianism but places a heavier emphasis on conservative social values, white racial resentment, and isolationist nationalism. It is, in many ways, a forerunner of today’s alt-right. The appeal of Paul and Trump to many Americans is not so much their specific policy ideas as their anti-establishment temperament and rhetoric, and, more specifically, a feverish anti-elitism that inevitably leads to conspiracy-mongering.