In which (((Jeff Goldstein))), aka Protein Wisdom, considers the Alt-Right via the 16-points I laid out and concludes that Democrats are the Real Racists the Alt-Right are the Real Leftists in The Federalist.
The Alt-Right Is The Mirror Image Of The New Left
Our system was designed for assimilation and naturalization. The complete corruption of that system and the usurpation of its intent by those who redefine it in the terms of transnational progressivism are largely responsible for the resurgence of the white nationalism at the heart of the alt-right’s identitarian “philosophy.”
Concerns over a loss of sovereignty or the overdetermined influence granted preferred minority groups are legitimate, despite the putative conservatives who pretend they are not, or parrot an establishment apologia that waxes poetic about “inclusivity” and “economic growth” while Americans are increasingly self-segregating and an entire generation of young people will struggle to find a way into the workforce. I can read crime statistics, and have watched states turn blue as the result not of good Democratic Party governance but entitlement promises and the logistical changes that inevitably follow. Libertarian economist Milton Friedman knew well that you can’t have an open borders-type immigration system tied to a welfare state. That’s precisely what we now have.
Still, there are fixes to our national maladies that reside in the constitutional system of government we each inherited as our birthright as American citizens. American exceptionalism, which neither Barack Obama nor Donald Trump understand or can articulate, was born of our founding. This exceptionalism is found not in its genetic makeup (after all, we fought other white Europeans for our independence) but in a collage of Enlightenment ideas our Founders pulled together to create what became our national portrait.
To reclaim our birthright, we need only reclaim the Constitution. We need to re-embrace American exceptionalism and reject the kind of toxic identitarianism the Left uses to divide us, manage us, and place us into needy voter blocs they then collect to win elections, and through which an institutionalized progressive cancer spreads to eat away its bones.
Identity Politics On the Right
But we need recognize this cancer is not necessarily isolated within a given political party. It is opportunistic: in the ’60s, it infiltrated the “bourgeois” Democratic Party the cultural Marxists despised to become the New Left that today controls many of our institutions. As it did so, this long march created a counter-trend we now see bubbling up through cracks in our national foundation.
This counter-trend, make no mistake, is every bit as identitarian as anything Edward Said ever wrote, and just as toxic. Said enormously influenced Western academics. His Orientalism laid out the case for identity politics, declaring who controls particular group narratives and how, and who and what comes to count as “authentic” and thus permitted to represent a given identity group and its (collectivist) narrative. Identity politics necessarily brackets and minimizes individualism. As with much the Left does, it remains policed by a kind of mob shaming and an enforced intellectual correctness that is linguistically incoherent.
Unfortunately, this same set of core beliefs is now ascendant on a vocal part of the self-described “Right.” In his “What the Alt Right is,” Vox Day, one of the leaders of the alt-right “movement,” details what he calls “a core Alt Right philosophy upon which others can build,” then provides a list of 16 items one can imagine he sees himself virtually nailing to the doors of Benetton stores like a modern-day Martin Luther.
Read the whole thing. It is more than a little illuminating with regards to how the conservatives think, although there is nothing that is likely to surprise any regular reader of this blog. I will respond to it in detail later this week, but feel free to share your own thoughts in the meantime.