Hillary Clinton’s speech attacking the alt-right was music to the ears of establishment Republicans who have been, since the beginning of the campaign, similarly attacking Donald Trump and his supporters.
It’s like nothing we’ve heard before from a nominee for president of the United States, said Clinton.
From the start, Donald Trump has built his campaign on prejudice and paranoia.
He’s taking hate groups mainstream and helping a radical fringe take over one of America’s two major political parties.
His disregard for the values that make our country great is profoundly dangerous, concluded Mrs. Clinton.
What are the “values” that Mrs. Clinton thinks made this country great?
Multi-culturalism?
Political correctness?
Embrace of open borders?
Rejection of American exceptionalism?
According to Mrs. Clinton, if you reject multi-culturalism and political correctness and favor protection of American national sovereignty and American exceptionalism then you are a dangerous alt-right “extremist” who should be barred from polite society and ran out of politics.
All of this sounds very new and exciting to the urban elite media who are ever anxious to find a reason to justify their contempt for working Americans, particularly rural and suburban white people out in what they call “fly-over country.”
But it is certainly not a new battle in Republican politics and not a new charge from Democrats to call Americans who believe in national sovereignty and American exceptionalism “extremists.”
Indeed, the charge of being “extremists” used by the establishment media, the Democrats and the establishment Republicans against conservatives goes back to 1964 and the “Stop Goldwater” campaign.
And Goldwater, to his credit—but also to the aid of his political destruction—embraced the term with what became one of the catchphrases of his political philosophy:
Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.
This is much the same philosophy that those now being attacked as alt-right extremists claim to believe.
Does the alt-right online community include individuals who are racists, white supremacists and who knows what else? Perhaps.
Does it include anonymous online trolls who revel in juvenile and obnoxious, even hateful, provocations? It certainly does.
Does the alt-right speak for millions of Americans of all races who have been left behind and viewed with contempt by the globalist urban elite of establishment media, and the Democratic and Republican parties? Most assuredly.
And therein is the real issue. It’s not that people who choose to express themselves in alt-right terms and embrace its more provocative figures don’t have a legitimate claim to being victimized by the elitists who have taken over the culture and government of the United States. They do.
As liberal journalist and co-founding editor of The Intercept Glenn Greenwald told Slate‘s Isaac Chotiner:
One of the things that is bothering me and bothered me about the Brexit debate, and is bothering me huge about the Trump debate, is that there is zero elite reckoning with their own responsibility in creating the situation that led to both Brexit and Trump and then the broader collapse of elite authority.
The reason why Brexit resonated and Trump resonated isn’t that people are too stupid to understand the arguments. The reason they resonated is that people have been so [expletive] by the prevailing order in such deep and fundamental and enduring ways that they can’t imagine that anything is worse than preservation of the status quo.
You have this huge portion of the populace in both the U.K. and the U.S. that is so angry and so helpless that they view exploding things without any idea of what the resulting debris is going to be to be preferable to having things continue, and the people they view as having done this to them to continue in power. That is a really serious and dangerous and not completely invalid perception that a lot of people who spend their days scorning Trump and his supporters or Brexit played a great deal in creating.
In this Greenwald is most assuredly correct. The alt-right movement isn’t inherently racist in its rejection of the establishment policies of globalism and multi-culturalism and open borders. It is largely economic, based on the fact that, as Greenwald put it, “The reason they resonated is that people have been so [expletive] by the prevailing order in such deep and fundamental and enduring ways that they can’t imagine that anything is worse than preservation of the status quo.”
Movement conservatives should acknowledge that in matters of national sovereignty and economic growth they have too often allowed cultural issues and philosophical navel-gazing to subsume the practical everyday economic concerns of young Americans.
Conservatives have had this discussion before as William F. Buckley and early leaders of the modern conservative movement strove to drive racists, Klansmen and the white supremacists of white citizens’ councils and the like out of the movement.
Today’s conservative leaders ought to do the same—reject the racists and vulgar online trolls while acknowledging the legitimacy of the alt-right demands for reasserting national sovereignty, economic growth and full support for American exceptionalism back into the mainstream conservative agenda.
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