Even The Weekly Standard and The Nation have figured out that the Fake Right doesn’t actually have anything to do with genuine right-wing ideology:
Writer Donna Minkowitz describes a secret meeting organized by alt-right figure Richard Spencer that she crashed in mid-November at an organic winery in Maryland. Upon arrival, Minkowitz writes that she was surprised to find that the discussion centered not only on the usual brown-shirt Jew-hating you might expect from neo-Nazis, but also on what she says is a “new emphasis on economic issues” that she found “seductive.”
Why seductive? Because the white supremacists’ views on economic issues sound a lot like, well, like views espoused by the Nation and Democratic party progressives. In what could pass for Bernie Sanders campaign literature, she quotes Spencer saying “I support national health care” and railing against “the trillions spent in insane wars.” Minkowitz also quotes Spencer blasting the GOP tax plan as “stupid . . . Reaganite nostalgia” and supporting a universal basic income. Another speaker decried that everything is seemingly becoming “corporatized and capitalized.” Wait—is this a white supremacist conference or a New York Times editorial board meeting?
She quotes another speaker exclaiming that “2018 is going to be the year of leftists joining the white-nationalist movement!”
As I’ve pointed out before, “white nationalism” is not nationalism, it is actually anti-nationalist imperialism. And just like every other previous pan-ethnic attempt, from Hitler’s pan-Germanism to Nasser’s pan-Arabism and Henry Sylvester Williams’s pan-Africanism, Richard Spencer’s left-wing, imperial pan-Caucasianism will go absolutely nowhere and will continue to fail to appeal to nearly all white people.
Imperial pan-ethnicism is nothing new. Pan-Africanism has been around since 1900 and yet the various African nations and tribes remain entirely distinct. Pan-Arabism was a little more successful, as the United Arab Emirates is still around and the United Arab Republic of Iraq, Syria, and Egypt lasted three whole years from 1958 to 1961.
Nations persist for a reason. Multinational empires fall for the same reason. And the manifold evils of the European Union are just a few of the many reasons that imperial pan-ethnic empires always fail, usually sooner rather than later.
The Alt-Right is inevitable because the waves of history are now strongly trending towards nationalism. The Fake Right will be an empty shell within four years; the only reason it even survives now is because it is a useful bogeyman for the mainstream media in the mode of David Duke and the Westboro Baptist Church.