A column in the Washington Post looks at three new books that have studied the so-called "Alt-Right" which in the final analysis is little more that various groups of white supremacists who have as an ultimate goal the ridding of racial minorities from the country. Also in need of elimination in the view of the Alt-Right is anyone who opposes its racist and misogynist agenda. In this world, skin color matters more than anything else and non-whites are simply less than human. It's an ugly, vicious and dangerous mindset. Perhaps most troubling is the fact that evangelical Christians have rallied to the Al-Right/Trump standard, thereby emblazoning their moral bankruptcy for all to see. The irony is that in the process of pushing a racist agenda, these so-called Christians are killing the Christian brand at large. Hence the rapid rise in the number of "Nones" and the dramatic exodus of the under Millennial generation from organized religion. Here are column highlights:
Trump’s electoral victory one year ago this week was not merely his own, nor that of the befuddled party that relinquished its nomination to him. It was also a triumph for the dark tangle of forces we’ve come to know as the alt-right. Long before the 2016 campaign, the alt-right was already gathering strength and allies; it simply needed a standard-bearer. Then there was Trump, a leader with enough star power and authoritarian charisma to grant his alt-right supporters visibility and stature, to lower the social costs of open bigotry, to give energy to the movement’s underlying vision.
Several people have sought to interpret that vision — Hillary Clinton gave it a go with a harsh campaign speech, while Breitbart offered a sanitized taxonomy of the group — and now books on the subject are starting to pour forth.
Although it’s hard to pin down a shifting collection of meme-crazed commenters, hard-core conspiracists and race-obsessed marchers long enough to bind them in hardcover, three new works make that effort from different vantage points. [F]or all its attacks on left-wing identity politics, [the Alt-Right] is particularly focused on supplanting traditional conservatism with a white identity politics of the right. And although alt-right supporters are energized by Trump, they are not beholden to him. Indeed, the president’s alt-right credentials may be more about aping its brutal sensibility than fully embracing its substance. Trump’s self-interest helped pull the alt-right out from the digital swamps, but he may be simply marking the beginning of its rapid ascent, with some truer and more skilled political patron yet to come. Proponents of the movement, he notes, are largely uninterested in moral traditionalism, economic liberty, a strong national defense — all the premises of 20th-century American conservatism. Tax cuts do not energize their ranks, and even abortion is fine if it serves eugenic purposes. They are driven, more than anything, by identity politics, which in their case is a more elevated description for unadulterated racism. Today, Hawley writes, “the most energetic and significant figures of the movement want to see the creation of a white ethnostate in North America.” White supremacists want to dominate other racial or ethnic groups; white nationalists want to see those competing groups gone altogether. . . . . Alt-right animosity toward the GOP flows from the belief that even though they depend on white votes, “conservatives in power rarely promote white interests.”
Hawley himself believes that the United States has operated as a de facto white supremacist nation for much of its history. But the alt-right wants de facto to become de jure, too — to explicitly wage battle against the growth of non-white communities, including immigrants, in the United States, and to “push transparent white-identity politics, with the ultimate goal of stopping and even reversing these demographic trends,” . . .
In “Kill All Normies,” Nagle describes a world, found in sites such as 4chan and Reddit, where nihilism, cynicism, irony and absurd in-joke humor have mingled with pornography, racism and misogyny to produce a “taboo-breaking anti-PC style” that characterized the early alt-right. . . . . (The “normies” of Nagle’s book title is alt-slang for whites who have not achieved racial consciousness and militancy.)
[T]he alt-right is about more than race; it is an indiscriminate and brutal aesthetic that also targets women, religious and cultural minorities, and virtually anyone promoting notions of egalitarianism — all for the sake of forestalling a supposed civilizational and demographic decline. Neiwert looks beyond conservative schisms, left-wing failings and online subcultures to pinpoint the experiences and beliefs that bind the alt-right together, and he calls the world he finds “Alt-America” — “an alternative dimension, a mental space beyond fact or logic, where the rules of evidence are replaced by paranoia.” It is a world of Patriots and Three Percenters, a world where Ruby Ridge and Waco loom as eternal warning signs of encroaching fascism, where the federal Bureau of Land Management is more hated than the IRS. It is an environment suffused with conspiracy and grievance, where Barack Obama is a secret Muslim, climate change is a hoax . . . .
Neiwert considers the GOP and traditional conservatives complicit in the degrading of discourse and truth on the far right, whereby “rational anger and discontent with the federal government was being transformed into an irrational, visceral, and paranoid hatred of it.” Conspiracy theories and white-nationalist narratives coalesced in response to the nation’s first black president, giving Trump his opening. Birtherism became his calling card to Alt-America; the border wall and travel ban his sales pitch. Trump fits with the alt-right’s abusive culture, and studies of the psychology of online trolls highlight their deception, narcissism and manipulativeness — traits not inconsistent with what psychiatrists observe in our 45th commander in chief. The core alt-right wants more than greater immigration restrictions and temporary travel bans against a handful of Muslim-majority countries. It wants nonwhites out of the country altogether. Trump and his aides have called for measures that, however extreme, fall short. “What Trump has succeeded in doing, by exploiting the strands of right-wing populism in the country, has been to make the large and growing number of proto-fascist groups in America larger and more vicious,” Neiwert concludes.
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