Category Archives: The Alt Right

The Company You Keep

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As I’ve been noting for about eight years on this blog, I’m intensely ambivalent about Donald Triump.

His personality roils with traits I personally don’t care for.

But something about all the prosperity, peace and border security is looking good.

“Oh, Merg, so you just want someone who’ll make the trains run on time, yuk yuk”

Peace and security are legitimate jobs of a national government. Prosperity is the opposite of the “Fascist” dynamic you’re yukking about. And Trump at his wackiest didn’t approach the level of authoritarianism of any of Baraclk Obama’s three terms in office.

I’m on Team DeSantis [1],but if it came down to Biden, Harris or Newsom against Trump, I’d probably hold my nose and vote Trump.

The worst thing about Trump is that he, like Obama before him, is the center of a personality cult. And with Trump, soooooo many of the cultists are just so deeply dim:

Loomer – charitably described as “insane” – cites a piece on by David Greenberg, a Rutgers historian who’s never been mistaken for someone who’d throw a life ring to a conservative who fell overboard.

Bill Clinton infamously threw some of his more extreme supporters under the bus in his long forgotten”Sista Soulja” moment (in the the long-forgotten Sista Soulja”). Trump’s never gonna have a “Crazy Laura” moment.

If he did, I might have to hold my nose a little less hard.

[1] And yeah, I think in a just world Doug Burgum would be on the short list, but we don’t live in a just world.

Tarred

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The good news?  You’ve got people on the left defending free speech on campus, and defending it well, as Charles C. Cooke notes in the National Review about a piece in New York Magazine by Jesse Singal:.

But there’s still a bit of fact-checking to do, as Cooke notes – in this case, quoting Singal:

“The existence of white nationalist Richard Spencer, and other bigoted far-right figures like him, poses a genuine challenge to public universities. Conservative student groups invite these sorts of figures to speak fairly often, and the courts have consistently held that public universities can’t really interfere with such events.”

There’s just one thing wrong:

Having read this, you could be forgiven for thinking that “conservative student groups” have invited ”white nationalist Richard Spencer” to speak on campus, and that they have done so “fairly often.” This isn’t correct. Richard Spencer has indeed spoken on college campuses recently. But, invariably, he has invited himself.

After which the conservative groups do what they do – defend actual free speech, including the stuff that everyone hates, which is indeed why we need “Free Speech” in the Constitution in the first place.

So there’s that.

But there’s one other problem:  Singal refers to Spencer et al as “bigoted far-right figures”.   And he’s far from alone.

Thing is, as Michael Knowles points out in this superb Prager U video, the “Alt-Right” is not right.  It repudiates, in fact, much of what American conservatism believes:

To sum up, the “Alt-Right” – or “Alternative to the Right” – believes in:

  • Relentless identity politics, just like Big Left does, only in  its case the identity is “White”.
  • Atheistic.  Christianity important to the alt-right only as a motivator for Western European civilizzation – but rejects faith as a moral, ethical or spiritual force.
  • A disdain for the value of the individual in favor of the primacy of the group.

Conservatism is focused on the individual, and the presence of a stable, higher order (even conservative atheists – they exist – generally believe in some sort of higher moral order).

I know, I know – they christened themselves “Alt-Right”, sparing the media the trouble of doing it for them.