The fact that the Republican Party is home to white supremacists isn’t a new thing. When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and commented that Democrats “have lost the South for a generation,” it wasn’t because there was some sudden flux of “economic anxiety.” It was because white supremacists saw acknowledging the rights of all Americans as an assault on the special position that whites had held, and continue to hold, in the United States. Johnson’s signature served to concentrate white supremacists within the Republican Party. And there they have remained.
Republican politicians have known this. They’ve known that defending white privilege has been a linchpin of their party’s power. Whether fueled by images of Willie Horton or stories of “welfare queens,” they’ve gone over and over to fear of black Americans as a touchstone of the party. They’ve known that whether they call it the Silent Majority, or the Moral Majority, or the Forgotten Majority, what they really mean is the white majority.
Anytime Republicans have worried that their voters might fail to toe the line on tax cuts for the wealthy or loosening regulations on investment banks, they always had a dogwhistle in their back pocket. It’s not even as if all those Republicans required a dog whistle. There have always been those who flew their banner of racism proudly—David Duke was, after all, a state representative, and he was far from alone.
The only difference over the last election cycle has been the number of Republicans who simply stopped pretending that they were embarrassed over racist policies and racist comments for racist purposes. Buzzfeed’s otherwise excellent reporting on the actions of Steve Bannon and the Breitbart staff in uniting the Republican Party with splinter white supremacy movements isn’t really the tale of a party taken over by outside ideas.
It’s the story of a party surrendering to its own worst elements—and the story of how Breitbart is just like the party it serves.
These new emails and documents, however, clearly show that Breitbart does more than tolerate the most hate-filled, racist voices of the alt-right. It thrives on them, fueling and being fueled by some of the most toxic beliefs on the political spectrum — and clearing the way for them to enter the American mainstream.
That Bannon shaped Breitbart into an engine for concentrating hate doesn’t make it a new thing. It makes it a mirror of what Reagan, and Thurmond, and Gingrich, and Cruz, and Gohmert, and McConnell, and the majority of Republicans in Congress right this moment have done.
[The letters] capture what Bannon calls his “killing machine” in action, as it dredges up the resentments of people around the world, sifts through these grievances for ideas and content, and propels them from the unsavory parts of the internet up to TrumpWorld, collecting advertisers’ checks all along the way.
The biggest fuel for the Breitbart machine, and for the whole Republican enterprise, has long been white resentment. It’s the well-fed impression that African Americans are poor, promiscuous, lazy, and unpredictably violent. One or more of those slanders can always be called on to serve.
Like all the new media success stories, Breitbart’s alt-right platform depends on the participation of its audience. It combusts the often secret fury of those who reject liberal norms into news, and it doesn’t burn clean.
Now Bannon is back at the controls of the machine, which he has said he is “revving up.” The Mercers have funded Yiannopoulos's post-Breitbart venture. And these documents present the clearest look at what these people may have in store for America.
Ready to be surprised? What they have in mind is to funnel even more white supremacist and white nationalist ideas into Republican politics, partly by taking ideas that have long circulated among neo-Nazi fascists and repackaging them as simply “alt-right,” and partly by continuously edging more white supremacist language into discussions until it becomes commonplace.
It’s not so much a story of how Republicans got their white supremacy back, as one of the lengths Bannon and Milo Yiannopoulos were willing to go in order to generate a theme of white persecution, even when no hint of such a problem existed.
It also provides fascinating insight into the mindset of Breitbart’s leadership, such as this friendly note from Bannon to Yiannopoulos.
“Your [sic] full of shit. When I need your advice on anything I will ask. ... The tech site is a total clusterfuck---meaningless stories written by juveniles. You don’t have a clue how to build a company or what real content is. And you don’t have long to figure it out or your [sic] gone. … You are magenalia [sic].”
They’re a machine that searches for hate, generates hate, concentrates hate, and runs on hate.
The story told by the letters is fascinating and Joseph Bernstein’s reporting on the piece is terrific. If you haven’t read it, read it. But don’t mistake the rise of Breitbart for the rise of white nationalism or its constant effort to put a fresh coat of (white) paint on Nazi-inspired ideas as a new thing for the Republican Party.
The Breitbart alt-right machine ... was a brilliant audience expansion machine, financed by billionaires, designed to draw in people disgusted by some combination of identity politics, Muslim and Hispanic immigration, and the idea of Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama in the White House. And if expanding that audience meant involving white nationalists and neo-Nazis, their participation could always be laundered to hide their contributions.
Or not.
