Austria’s chancellor Christian Kerr has announced that the Islamic veil will be banned and new Muslim immigrants will have to sign an “integration contract” committing to uphold “Enlightenment values”.  These and other measures are designed to shore up political support in the wake of the very near miss of Norbert Hofer in last year’s messy presidential elections and continuing good polling by the FPÖ.

However, as I noted last September in my piece on incrementalism, liberal politicians don’t renounce their dedication to the race project.  Herr Kerr’s publicly stated motivation is to avoid “giving 600,000 Muslims in Austria the feeling that they are not part of our society.”  He doesn’t want to so inconvenience Muslims that they leave.  He wants the race project to continue.  He will always want the race project to continue.

This, of course, is the inevitable consequence of nationalist parties straying from their fidelity to kind, at least in terms of their political positions and statements.  Ask the Establishment a simple question and, in time, it will make all the right noises without much difficulty.  Rutte is doing it in Holland.  Fillon is doing it in France.  The Establishment is untroubled by its own hypocrisy and, anyway, nothing much will actually change.  Muslims will sign on the dotted line.  They will adapt a little, on the surface.  But they will become politically astute.  They will develop a narrative of victimhood.  There will be demonstrations by women in bin bags.  They will push the authorities to see where the boundaries are.  The boundaries will not hold.  The “integration contract” will fall into disrepute.

Years will have been wasted ... precious years in terms of the changing demographics ... because nationalists did not dare to advance nationalism with honesty and eloquence (and, perhaps, because they had no non-Nietzschean understanding by which to do so).  Instead, they chased after power in a liberal polity, and believed in the deceiver incrementalism as a provider of real change.