In its apparent quest to “normalize” the wholesale trashing of American values wrought by the election of Donald Trump, the New York Times gives equal time to Christopher Caldwell, Senior Editor of the reactionary, neo-conservative Weekly Standard, for his take on the rise of white supremacy, Neo-Nazism and the spread of race-based hatred currently marketed as the “alt-right.”
Caldwell makes the appropriate, obligatory gestures of discomfiture one would expect from someone tasked with analyzing for the genteel Times readership a movement whose endgame leads directly to Auschwitz. So it’s perhaps understandable that in reading Caldwell, who has in the past declared that history will “eviscerate” President Obama and has compared his achievements to those of Mikhail Gorbachev, we drift off and forget how much of this newfangled digital white supremacy owes its roots to the very conservative race-baiting philosophy folks like Caldwell have nurtured for decades.
Here we get an oddly dispassionate tour of the so called “alt-right” not from the perspective of those it intends to victimize and harass, but from its doting, tolerant forebears. From the get-go Caldwell expresses a weird sense of wonderment as to what is happening before all of our eyes, as if it wasn’t the natural culmination of everything he and the conservative movement stand for:
Not even those most depressed about Donald J. Trump’s election and what it might portend could have envisioned the scene that took place just before Thanksgiving in a meeting room a few blocks from the White House.
Caldwell is talking about this meeting in D.C. where members of the so-called “alt-right” supremacy movement met to cheers of Heil Trump and extended the Nazi Salute. Here’s the video in case you missed it:
Really? No one could have envisioned this? The only people that couldn’t “envision” this are those who haven’t been paying attention for the last six months. Is Caldwell really suggesting that no one could have imagined a Jew-hating, black-lynching right that has dwelt under rocks for decades wouldn’t have been emboldened and cheered by an American Presidential candidate who openly campaigned on the forced separation of brown people from the American body public? Who proposed a Muslim “registry” reminiscent of the Nuremberg Laws (for those who can’t understand what this means, try imagining a candidate proposing a “Jewish” registry)? Who actively encouraged his supporters to manhandle black protesters, with chilling effectiveness?
I envisioned it months before it happened and I’m just a lowly blogger. I’m not the only one.
Of course, there’s a silver lining in all of this for conservatives. Caldwell thinks that “reservations” about “multiculturalist” policies may be voiced “more strenuously” by other “dissenters” (note they are now no longer racists, but “dissenters”) after Trump’s elevation of these people to the national stage.
Mr. Trump’s success is bound to embolden other dissenters. This could mean a political climate in which reservations about such multiculturalist policies as affirmative action are voiced more strenuously...[.]
That is pure conservative-speak. Affirmative action is not a “multiculturalist” policy. It is a policy designed to correct the indisputable impact of our country’s history of racism (and sexism) by enhancing opportunities for women and people of color. But if the white supremacists and Nazis now have the media’s attention, well it sure wouldn’t hurt the conservative cause would it?
Almost all of them are gung-ho for Mr. Trump. That is a surprise. “I’ve been watching these people for 17 years,” said Heidi Beirich, who follows extremist movements for the Southern Poverty Law Center. “It’s the first time I’ve seen them come out for a candidate.”
It is not a “surprise.” This is the first presidential candidate since George Wallace to base his campaign on race-baiting. It’s entirely predictable that these elements of American society would rally behind him. Who is Caldwell kidding? And why suggest that someone from the SPLC said it when she didn’t?
Last summer “alt-right,” though it carried overtones of extremism, was not an outright synonym for ideologies like Mr. Spencer’s.
Uh, yes it was. And yes, it did.
Not many of the attendees at the Washington gathering favored the term “white supremacist.” The word implies a claim to superiority — something few insisted on. “White nationalist” is closer to the mark; most people in this part of the alt-right think whites either ought to have a nation or constitute one already. But they feel that almost all words tend to misdescribe or stigmatize them.
What isn’t “surprising" is that these types would run from the "white supremacist” label like scalded dogs, because, well, it doesn’t sound too good. “White Nationalist” doesn’t have that burdensome KKK quality. But the bottom line is you don’t want a separate “white” nation unless you believe that everyone else is too inferior to belong to that nation. Please don’t waste our time pretending otherwise.
Caldwell does his level best to avoid the fact that the “alt-right” has inexplicably morphed itself into something conservatives can’t be proud of:
The adjective “alt-right” has been attached in the past to those, like the undercover documentarian James O’Keefe (known for his secret recordings of Planned Parenthood encounters), whose conservatism is mainstream...
(Note in conservative-speak, James O’Keefe is not a lying criminal punk but an “undercover documentarian.” Sort of a cross between Ken Burns and 60 Minutes).
Caldwell finds a way to assign blame to “multiculturalism” for the rise of these folks under the facile theory that colleges who stress minority rights shouldn’t be surprised that whites adopt a similar posture. Which is a fine argument until you consider the fact that whites are not an oppressed class worthy or needing of such protection. Caldwell also exonerates Trump himself, suggesting “no good evidence” would suggest that Trump is either racist or Anti-semitic. He also takes pains to put in a good word for Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief counsel and advisor whose Breitbart News agency is now the de facto media outlet for the “alt-right” :
Not even the former Breitbart editor at large Ben Shapiro, who has become an energetic critic of Mr. Bannon and his agenda, says that Mr. Bannon is himself a racist or an anti-Semite.
The fact that Shapiro “didn’t say it” proves exactly nothing. If Bannon willingly abets and facilitates it—and he does—that makes him Anti-Semitic and a racist. And perhaps Bannon’s ex-wife knows more about his proclivities than his former colleague:
During Bannon’s reign over Breitbart, the website ran articles referring to conservative commentator Bill Kristol as a “renegade Jew” and Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum as “a Polish, Jewish, American elitist scorned.” Former Breitbart editor Ben Shapiro accused the site of embracing “a movement shot through with racism and anti-Semitism,” and Bannon’s ex-wife has testified in court that Bannon has “said he doesn’t like Jews” and didn’t want his children to go to school with Jews.
The fact is that racism is indelibly embedded in conservative political thought, and this “white identity” facade is simply the culmination of racism refined for decades by conservatives. From Nixon’s Southern strategy to Reagan’s mythical Welfare Queens, to the Tea Party’s race-based backlash against President Obama, to the “conservatives” on the Supreme Court of the United States gutting the Voting Rights Act, conservatism and racism are permanently intertwined. The Republican Party is its chosen vehicle.
Caldwell conveniently ignores this. He would have us forget 50 years of so-called “conservative” politics where race became the defining factor of the Republican Party.
We don’t need lectures or analysis from the Right to “enlighten” us on the strain of racism currently in vogue. We’ve seen it coming for a long time.