There’s obviously nothing new about the gaggle of extreme RW elements described as making up the “Alt-Right”. They constitute the same malignant stew that has been bubbling under the surface of the “Conservative” movement for the past three decades and which, ever since the election of Ronald Reagan, has attempted to rebrand it’s poisonous ideas as the central tenets of US Conservatism.
Spencer’s Magazine (since re-named as Radix) drew it’s inspiration from an even earlier source:
So far from being a brand new movement, Alt-Right is more of a new label promoted by the same motley crew of racist reactionaries that have been active for years. A chief example of these being Jared Taylor, an out spoken racist who founded American Renaissance Magazine in 1990 and who is a Board Member of the Council of Conservative Citizens, the successor organization to the racist White Citizens Councils of the 50’s and 60’s.
Verbose and overloaded with the kind of historical digressions and simplistic allusions regularly deployed to disguise intellectual mediocrity, Gottfried’s address is still worth a critical reading to glean a few points of substance. Once we have pared away the verbiage, certain key elements emerge.
First and foremost is the recognition that Gottfried’s conception of the “Alternative Right” places it as a direct out growth and extension of the earlier racist nativism of the paleo Conservatives. A heritage that paleo Conservatives were in the process of abandoning and therefore must be taken up anew.
He is neither so vulgar or clumsy as to state this in explicit terms. He prefers to employ euphemisms that lend a faux aura of academic rectitude to what is nothing more than a reiteration of 19th century theories of European and white supremacy.
In 1986 I noted in an article for the Heritage Foundation’s Policy Review that most paleo thinkers were Protestants or Jews. They were also preoccupied with sociobiology, a discipline or way of thinking that had influenced them deeply. Today the paleo camp looks markedly different as well as much older, and it shows little interest in the cognitive, hereditary preconditions for intellectual and cultural achievements. And the despair about American society among paleos may be pushing some of them toward the liberal immigrationist camp, providing they’re not already there. Others of this group have become so terrified by those on their left that they pretend not to notice the stark fact of human cognitive disparities. This quest for innocuousness sometimes takes the form of seminars on educational problems centering on endless sermons about values and featuring rotating lists of edifying books. Presumably everyone would perform up to speed if he/she could avail himself/herself of the proper cultural tools. The fact that not everyone enjoys the same genetic precondition for learning is irrelevant for this politically motivated experiment in wishful thinking.
Note that despite their presentation as neutral generalities, “Sociobiology”, “hereditary preconditions”, “human cognitive disparities”, “genetic precondition for learning”, in the context of immigration and the audience he is addressing, these are understood to refer to people and populations of color.
As it develops, Gottfried views any departure from the racist application of these axioms to be a surrender to the left and the abandonment of “true” Conservatism. Albeit expressed in the same allusive and euphemistic terms. Any individual or movement that doesn’t accept the racist application of these axioms, be they Neo-Conservative, Movement Conservative, Religious Conservative or even Paleo-Conservative are, in fact, opponents.
This theme, along with implicit white supremacy, runs throughout his address.
More recently we have been confronted by another problem on the right, namely groups that give little evidence of being what they claim to be. As far as I can tell, there is nothing intrinsically rightwing about denying the claims of family and society on the putatively autonomous individual. And the dream of living outside of the state in a society of self-actualizing individuals, opening themselves up to being physically displaced by the entire Third World, if its population chooses to settle on this continent, is not a rightist alternative to anything. It is a failed leftist utopia.
Here Gottfried throws the “Libertarian Right” under the bus, specifically because it doesn’t have room for the sort of racist authoritarianism he espouses. The absence of which he equates with being “Leftist”.
Having written off every element of the Right that doesn’t embrace his own white supremacist world view, Gottfried holds out hope that the future favors his malignant ideology.
We have youth and exuberance on our side, and a membership that is largely in its twenties and thirties. We have attracted beside old-timers like me, as I noted in my introductory paragraph, well-educated young professionals, who consider themselves to be on the right, but not of the current conservative movement. These “post-paleos,” to whom I have alluded in Internet commentaries, are out in force here tonight. And they are radical in the sense in which William F. Buckley once defined a true Right, an oppositional force that tries to uncover the root causes of our political and cultural crises and then to address them.
And when I speak about the postpaleos, it goes without saying that I’m referring to a growing communion beyond this organization. It is one that now includes Takimag, VDARE.com, and other websites that are willing to engage sensitive, timely subjects.
Here we find what little there is that is new about the so-called Alt-Right. It isn’t to be found in the fundamental ideas that it promotes, since racist nativism is nothing new. It isn’t to be found in its intellectual or organizational antecedents either, since these can be traced back to the 1980’s and earlier.
What is new is the fact that it encompasses a new generation of white supremacists. A generation that is both tech savvy and cyber literate. One that embraces racist nativism as the sine qua non of Conservatism and which views not just Liberals and Democrats as the enemy but rejects the GOP and any other RW fraction that doesn’t share it’s racist obsessions as well.
Or, as Conservative author George H. Nash describes this mind set:
In the last year, these tensions have flared into an ideological civil war on the right. …. To conservatives in the “Never Trump” movement, who have vowed never to vote for him under any circumstances, Trump is an ignoramus and carnival barker at best, and a bullying proto-Fascist at worst. To many on the other side of the Great Divide, it is not Trump but an allegedly decadent and intransigent conservative “establishment” that is the threat, and they are attacking it savagely. Joining the effort to radically reconfigure conservatism on nationalist-populist lines is an array of aggressive dissenters called the “alternative right” or “alt-right,” many of whom openly espouse white nationalism and white-identity politics.
Read more at: www.nationalreview.com/...
Nash’s article is well worth a read, despite it’s RW slant, in that it provides a good thumbnail sketch of the fissures that lie concealed behind the facade of US conservatism.
Once we grasp the reality of these divisions in the RW, the political trajectory of the Republican base since the election of President Obama becomes comprehensible. Likewise Donald Trump’s unlooked for success in upending the GOP establishment.
For more than 30 years GOP “conservatives” have stoked and exploited racist attitudes and resentments for political advantage. They did so while turning a blind eye to the fact that this strategy strengthened the reach and influence of racist extremism both within the GOP and its base, complacent in the belief that they could control the tiger they had chosen to ride. They might have continued to do so except for the rise of President Obama.
With the election of the first African American US President and the signal failure of the Conservative establishment to destroy that Presidency, the white supremacist tiger has turned on its would be wranglers. A generation who have grown up in an atmosphere where “conservatism” was regularly treated as little more than a euphemism for white racism have concluded that this failure is their opportunity. The meteoric elevation of Trump and Trumpism has confirmed them in that view. As a result, they have essentially declared war on a conservative establishment that cynically nurtured and pandered to them. They are placing their chips on the racist populism that Trump has given voice to.
Only now that the racist right has begun to pose an existential threat to the GOP as a effective partner in the two party system have the Republicans and movement conservatives taken fright.
This fear and loathing is most apparent in the pages of The National Review which, long before Clinton, had entered the fray, accurately identifying the so-called “Alt-Right” as little more than rebranded Brownshirt’s. As Conservative writer Ian Tuttle pointed out in April:
There is, then, contra Bokhari and Yiannopoulos, continuity on the Alt-Right, from the more interesting thinkers to the “1488ers.” This label comes from 14, for the “14 Words” of neo-Nazism (“We Must Secure the Existence of Our People and a Future for White Children”), and 88, for the eighth letter of the alphabet, H, doubled, HH, ergo “Heil Hitler.” Clever, eh? Some want to put people in ovens; some just want an ability to “exit” multicultural society for an ethno-national arrangement. But they’re all in agreement: “All men are created equal” is not true. What follows is a 21st-century version of Blut und Boden — Blood and Soil — on one hand, or technological apocalypticism, on the other. But the two are not so different, as the Nazis understood.
Read more at: www.nationalreview.com/...
Granted Tuttle made this point in an effort to claim that Conservative’s are blameless for the rise the “Alt-Right” but the patent absurdity of that claim doesn’t detract from the essential truth.
So given that the Fascist, racist character of the “Alt-Right” has been called out by its opportunistic opponents on the Right, how is it that there can remain any confusion as to its neo-Nazi essence?
In part it is a testament to the media savvy of the coming generation of white supremacists. By promoting the same old poison under a new label, combined with the effective use of the internet and social media, they have provided the media with the kind of shiny, superficially “new” item that they are invariably attracted to. It is akin to the sort of “reboot” that commercial products undergo when they are rolled out as “New and improved”. What matters isn’t whether there is any significant difference or improvement so much as the ability to convince others that it’s “new” and therefore news.
This is, of course, the whole purpose of adopting the sobriquet of “Alt-Right”. That and co-opting the rebellious panache of such previous labels as Alternative Journalism, Alternative Rock, etc. It works because it is based on a shared interest of both the media and the racist right: attracting eyeballs.
Less clear is why some Liberals and Progressives have fallen in with this attempt at rebranding. Some, no doubt, are simply unaware of the actual character and antecedents of the “Alt right.” Liberals and Progressives do not, as a rule, acquaint themselves with what the RW says about itself, or its internal debates. Even those who do take an interest in such things usually rely on the indirect testimony of researchers.
However, we should also consider that recognizing the actual substance and content of the “Alt-Right” refutes one of the cherished illusions current on the center-Left. That racism is a mere relic of past generations that will die out as they die off.
If it is accepted that the so-called “Alt-Right” is new only in that represents the aspirations of a new generation of white supremacists, then it follows that the idea of racism withering away of it’s own actuarial accord is a pipe dream. If racism is a potent political as well as cultural force with inter-generational appeal, an ideology with a history and tradition, it has to be confronted and fought as such. This can’t be accomplished by adopting the rhetorical and conceptual frames imposed by that same movement.
Sec. Clinton, to her credit, recognized this in her blistering attack on the Alt-Right. She made it plain that “Alt-Right” was nothing more than a pretext for opening the door to the vilest forms of far Right extremism. We should all take note.
In confronting the so-called “Alt-Right” we should speak plainly as well.
The “alternative” being offered is racism, Fascism and Nazism. It is not in any way new or shiny. It is old and sodden with the blood of its victims. Neither it’s adherents or its enablers should be allowed to disguise that grim reality.