Jeff Goldstein: The Alt-Right Philosophy Is At Odds with America’s Fundamental Principles
An excellent piece at The Federalist. I agree with virtually every word. Some excerpts to whet your appetite:
American exceptionalism, which neither Barack Obama nor Donald Trump understand or can articulate, was born of our founding. This exceptionalism is found not in its genetic makeup (after all, we fought other white Europeans for our independence) but in a collage of Enlightenment ideas our Founders pulled together to create what became our national portrait.
To reclaim our birthright, we need only reclaim the Constitution. We need to re-embrace American exceptionalism and reject the kind of toxic identitarianism the Left uses to divide us, manage us, and place us into needy voter blocs they then collect to win elections, and through which an institutionalized progressive cancer spreads to eat away its bones.
. . . .
Vox Day claims “The Alt Right is an ALTERNATIVE to the mainstream conservative movement in the USA.” In this he lumps together all who have described themselves as conservatives and writes them off as only nominally so. Elsewhere you’ll see alt-righters refer to “Conservative Inc.,” which is shorthand for this claim. But this, too, is nonsense. Again, one is “conservative” or not based on what he believes and how he governs — and, importantly, based on the way the label is currently understood.
Simply adopting the label as it suits you doesn’t make you something you aren’t, much like calling your hamburger a carrot doesn’t make you a vegetarian. It is about a set of principles that, once they’ve become too commingled with self-serving pragmatism or “realism,” devolve into a mash of weak progressivism.
. . . .
According to Vox Day, “The Alt Right believes in victory through persistence and remaining in harmony with science, reality, cultural tradition, and the lessons of history.” Yet that same alt-right simultaneously misunderstands history, embraces tribalism, eschews American exceptionalism, and relies on the legitimate science of population genetics to draw pseudo-scientific racialist conclusions that glut the burgeoning field of white nationalist sociology.
This country was born out of clashes within the very homogeneous and unadulterated tribe he pines for.
Similarly, it speaks of a “cultural tradition” it can’t possibly define. Cultures are amalgams. To distill them down to that mythical moment of original purity is to pick a particular point in time to declare the culture the culture. It is an act of will, and a self-serving one at that. Making Vox Day’s support of a nationalism “homogeneous and unadulterated by foreign invasion and immigration” just another instance of rank tribalism — one that forgets this country was born out of clashes within the very homogeneous and unadulterated tribe he pines for.
Calling themselves anti-globalist, the alt-right defines itself against free-market capitalism. As Vox Day puts it, “The Alt Right rejects international free trade and the free movement of peoples that free trade requires. The benefits of intranational free trade is not evidence for the benefits of international free trade.” He does so shortly after declaring that the alt-right is “scientodific” — it “presumptively accepts the current conclusions of the scientific method (scientody).” Yet it rejects any evidence free trade has been a net positive for the United States in terms of living standards for citizens, wealth accumulation, and so on.
Read it all.
P.S. His avatar at the link is pretty funny.